


For I Am Bound and You Are Free

by EnglishAsSheIsSpoke



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, And as always Nile holds the team braincell except for when Booker takes his shirt off, And geographical accuracy for that matter, Angst, F/F, F/M, Lighthouses, M/M, Selkies, Sex, We laugh in the face of historical accuracy, What is a BB for if not for indulging in Harlequin-esque tropes, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:20:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29712237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishAsSheIsSpoke/pseuds/EnglishAsSheIsSpoke
Summary: After recovering from a physically and emotionally scarring battle injury, Nile Freeman undertakes employment at the Bressay Lighthouse on the far and fierce coast of the Shetland Islands. Drawn to the isolated lighthouse and its curious crew of keepers, Nile discovers the joys of the lonely island, the secrets of its inhabitants, and a curse that may doom them all.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 16
Kudos: 86
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	For I Am Bound and You Are Free

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by my desire to disappear into an isolated lighthouse for several months, preferably in a world without racism or homophobia. So this is set in a world almost but not entirely like ours, with differing wars and history. I also very much wanted to write a story about selkies, so it's a little confounding to me that seals barely appear in 'For I Am Bound and You Are Free'. Such as life. 
> 
> Many many thanks to aw-writing-no for looking it over for me and saying nice things. It honestly made my day!
> 
> praycambrian has created the most beautiful cover art and fanmix for this story and it can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2CWnKnQ7zE4Phjfkh6YgBT?si=73687075c4124275&nd=1. It needs to be listened to a million times because it's such a perfect playlist for capturing the mood of the story. The story title is taken from one of the songs on this fanmix: 'Marrying the Sea' by Declan O'Rourke. Thank you, PC!

_My dearest brother,_

_Only one more night at sea! I will miss the rocking of the bow on the waves terribly, I suspect, once I am returned to earth, but not the gagging of my fellow passengers as they lose their dinner during a storm. As mentioned in my last missive, the meals are not so wonderful as to be worth revisiting. It will be an unearthly delight to enjoy a vegetable once more. I have begun daydreaming about the fresh, crisp crunch of a carrot, so perhaps it is all for the best that land is almost in sight._

_I hope you have safely received my previous correspondence, since I could only send them at our short port stays and hope for their secure delivery to you. Is everyone well? How go your studies? My scar remains tight and pulls when I turn my neck, but I am using the oil and with time I think it will improve. The mark is barely noticeable so tell our mother not to worry. Though she may certainly knit and send scarves – the weather is abhorrent and they will come in relief. I am told the winter winds are not far off and my clothing is entirely unsuitable for island life, so I am sure to be off to a great start there. I shall advise the best way to address any packages in my next letter._

_~~I have had strange dreams since~~ ~~Have Dizzy or Jordan asked~~ _

_As you suggested before I left, I asked if I might climb up to one of the viewing stations. The captain kindly gave permission with a warning that if I fell in the ocean I may be lost and drown and if I fell on the deck I would likely break every bone in my body. So I write this letter to you from the viewing station right now. The view is incredible and well worth the trouble to climb up. Today I have seen cormorants, one lone gull, and several porpoises. The ship sways on the waves and the mast even more dramatically above it, so I have watched the clouds overheard while being rocked back and forth like a child. OH! I have also found out Bressay is the home of many otter colonies, or whatever you call a herd of them, so I look forward to seeing them for the first time as well. I shall keep you updated as to whatever other wildlife can be found on the island. I have a picture in my head of cliffs and hills, scenery and landscapes like nothing we have known. I shall do my best to send drawings._

_Tomorrow we pass the Bressay light, as I’m told it’s called, and arrive at Lerwick. There I will be collected by the Head Lighthouse Keeper and taken by ferry from the mainland, Shetland, to Bressay Island itself and be inducted into the Bressay Lighthouse Keepers. Surely a most noble and exclusive group to be made part of. Once again, tell mother not to worry. I shall keep my wits about me and won’t let the family name down._

_Captain Courtenay tells me that we are to have a celebratory dinner so I will leave it here, climb down from my post, and prepare for whatever that entails. If he intends to serve herring again, I shall mutiny._

_Your loving sister,_

_Nile Freeman_

As the sun rose over a frigid and dark ocean, Nile Freeman stood out of the way at the starboard rail of her stalwart vessel as the crew bustled around her, calling ‘Starboard this’ and ‘Rig the fore-sail that’. Her great coat was barely warm enough to keep her skin from pimpling, and her stomach grumbled in the hopes of demanding some breakfast. But Nile paid it no attention. She was waiting to see the first glimpse of the islands she had imagined for all these weeks. The voyage had been long, exciting and tiresome by turns. But she was here now. Years in the military had trained her to wake early, to pack carefully, to be prepared, and to watch carefully for what loomed in the distance. And to use the head before any other of the passengers woke up, since herring was just as delightful exiting the body as entering it.

And Bressay was just beginning to come into view. It still took hours to finish her long journey, the vicious winds battling against the ship’s sails. But time spent in reconnaissance was seldom wasted, as her father used to say, and Nile would not waste a single chance to get the lay of the land she would now call home. Slowly into sight rose the high cliffs and hills beyond. A rugged island on its fringe, but inland Nile could see jewel-green fields lit up by the shafts of sunlight that escaped the swiftly moving clouds overhead. Not an arid wasteland at all, whatever her brother had teased. In fact, the opposite, though there seemed few occupants. Gulls began flying with them, calling to each other, and diving on occasion into the sea around them.

Finally they rounded the southern end of the island and the Bressay Lighthouse came into sight. It perched, unlit in the daytime, on the edge of the coast looking out over Bressay Sound and the North Sea beyond. Nile squinted against the wind, trying to see the details, trying to see any figures, trying to place herself there. She imagined being in the lighthouse, watching this very ship sail into the harbour.

“That’ll be your new post, Sergeant,” said the captain’s mate, coming to stand beside her. “Ye’ll have a devil of a job there, working for that lot. The Principle’s a witch, ain’t ya heard, and her crew her acolytes-”

“Button up, Williams,” cut off Captain Courteney. He offered a hand to Nile to shake. “You’ll do just fine, Sergeant Freeman. They’re a good crew with a good leader.”

It seemed the crew breathed a sigh of relief as they crossed past the headland and lighthouse, through Bressay Sound and safely into Lerwick Harbour and calmer seas. The largest Shetland island rose up one side of the ship, while Bressay to her right seemed to shelter the harbour and much of the island from the North Sea’s ferocity.

Nile pulled her duffle bag over her shoulder and bidding a farewell to the ship’s crew with a nod of her head, walked down the gangway. There she had expected to find the Principle Lighthouse Keeper waiting for her, but the people bustling about were occupied loading or unloading their cargo. Nile saw what looked promisingly like a pub and resolved that it would be best to wait there if her new officer had been delayed, out of the way of the dockies. Likely it would be the first place they would check, she’d be in with a shot of finding a meal, and best of all, she’d be beyond the reach of the cutting wind.

Inside she stood at the bar and asked if the Principle Lighthouse Keeper was in the vicinity. The barkeep answered in the thick Scots accent that Nile was only just learning to understand, plus what she presumed was local lexicon that Nile had not a clue what it meant. Nile thanked the barkeep, hoping that was a suitable response.

“So you’re the new wickie,” came a low voice from behind her, in a clearer accent. Nile turned and there stood a tall woman with short dark hair, a drink in her hand that was presumably tea, though who could be sure when in the harbour. “Welcome to Shetland.”

“Thank you,” Nile nodded. “I wonder if you could help me. I’m supposed to meet Andromache Scythe here?” 

“That’ll be me. You can call me Andy.” The woman put down her drink and held a hand for Nile to shake. She looked Nile up and down as they did so, taking stock and coming to an inconclusive judgement. Nile recognised the look as like that of a long-serving Lieutenant, one who had been at the front too long, had spent too much time leading their troops into battles. Tired, chiefly. But when she smiled, it was welcoming.

“You’ll need warmer clothes than that. Winter’s yet to hit and the wind’s already slicing through those, I’ll wager,” Andy gave her clothing a derisive glance. She wasn’t wrong. Nile could once again feel the heat leeching away from her again as soon as they stepped foot outside the pub.

“The wind’s colder than I expected,” Nile acknowledged. “I was stationed in the South so I’m out of practice at colder climates.”

“We’ll sort you out. The fishermen’s wives give us gansies for good luck. If we’re warm, the light’s warm, and their families come home. So they say.”

The ferry ride across the harbour was quiet, mostly because once they found somewhere to sit Andy crossed her arms, leant her head back and apparently immediately fell asleep. Nile eyed her and then turned to watch the approaching coastline. So here was home for however long she stayed. It was forbidding. The rocky cliffs were buffeted by waves, and the rising landscape beyond looked empty of human life, though the rolling hills looked lush and green. Occasional outcrops of stony rock rose out of the ground and the sky above seemed endlessly vast. She’d been told there was a small local population on Bressay, though where they were hiding she couldn’t tell. There was even apparently a lord’s manor. From there, they traversed the island with a cart pulled by two stout little ponies. Nile’s duffle was sat upon it, along with food and fuel supplies for the month.

Andy offered little conversation as they made their way south. Nile filled the time with surveying the island, trying to spot the homes of other inhabitants, and watching the sun travel across the sky with them.

Finally, they arrived. The tip of the lighthouse peeked up over the landscape from a distance and slowly rose into full sight as the afternoon light began to dim. The surrounding hills were covered in tall grass, which played in the wind like a great invisible being was running its fingers gently against the ground. Perched between two bluffs, the lighthouse stood like a sentinel and beyond was the North Sea, vast and treacherous. Nile took it all in, wide-eyed and excited, as Andy unloaded her luggage and gestured for her to follow.

“You’re in for a treat,” Andy said, pushing the door open on the cottage. “Nicky’s off shift at the moment so he’s preparing you a welcoming dinner. Tomorrow it’s Booker’s turn and eating his experiments is gambling with your tastebuds. Unless you’re fond of raw mackerel.”

She led the way in and gestured at the doorway to a bedroom on the right. “You can stow your kit in here. It’s a two-bedroom cottage meant for a keeper’s family, but we’ve set up a Stag Light so the beds are on rota. Other bedroom’s just down the hallway on the left. Bathroom’s second door down, kitchen and main room after that. You can have dinner and then I’ll show you the lay of the land.”

Inside the room were two beds tucked against opposite walls, a large wardrobe, and a threadbare rug. For the little it held, it emanated a welcoming aura. Nile left her bag against the wall and followed Andy to the kitchen. It was better equipped than she expected, though perhaps that was because it was fitted out for a family. Thankfully it was warm and cosy as well, looked lived in and cared for. There were bookshelves against the far wall, pots and pans hanging from hooks, a heavy wooden table in the middle of the room, and a rangy man at the stove stirring a pot of something that smelled delicious.

He was caught up in singing softly, tasting the dish between words, and hadn’t notice their entrance. Andy, with a wry smile, let the door bang shut, resulting in a startled jump akin to a surprised cat and a splash of sauce across the wall.

“Andy, Andy, Andy, you scared me,” he scolded her.

Andy laughed and said, “This is Nicolò de Genova, one of our three Assistant Keepers. Nicolò, meet Nile Freeman.”

Nile held out her hand with a polite small and nod.

“Welcome, Nile, welcome,” he took her hand and shook it. “You can call me Nicky.”

“The others on deck?” Andy kept going before Nile could offer anything more than a nod.

“Booker’s up in the Light Room, working on the gearing, and Joe’s out with the paintbrush.”

“Anything to note?”

“Book said the shaft keeps slipping the gears and will keep playing hob until we receive the replacement part, so we’ll need to check and correct the bearings at least once a watch, if he can’t wrangle a temporary fix today.” Nicky tasted his stew again, this time without interruption, and nodded in satisfaction. “He seems to think fog is due as well.”

“I’ll log it and check the fuel levels for the siren,” Andy tapped her hand on his shoulder in a friendly gesture and then headed towards the door leading outside. “Give the new kid a bowl. I’ll be back in a tick.”

Nicky put a serving of the stew and a thick sliced of buttered, crusty bread in front of her, as Andy walked out and two men walked in.

“Ah, Nicolò, my genius, you have conjured our new fish out of kitchen ingredients, I see,” said the first man, dipping a finger into the pot for a taste and having his hand smacked for his troubles. A scruffy blonde broad man walked in behind him. He had what her grandmother would call sleepy eyes, the sort that seemed an effort for him to keep open. He sat next to her and nodded in greeting. 

“Nile, meet Yusuf al-Kaysani and Sébastien le Livre,” Nicky gestured at the two of them with his spoon. “The first is my heart and the second is my spleen.”

“Joe,” Nicky’s heart said with a wink. He had kind eyes paired with a friendly smile.

“Booker,” followed the second, reaching for a cup and a bottle.

“Booker?” Nile queried.

He snorted into his cup, and said, “Andy’s idea of a joke.”

Joe continued, “She was on a supply run to the harbour when she came across this sad specimen being thrown out of the pub.”

“She was in a generous mood, brought on, no doubt, by having to deal with these two alone, and decided to employ me,” Booker cut in. “She asked my name and immediately refused to bother with it. ‘Almost incomprehensible and unbearably French,’ as she put it.”

“He was adopted like a poor little street urchin,” Nicky seemed to find it charming. “By Andromache Scythe, Patron Saint of the Lost.”

“More like a mangy dog,” Joe retorted with a grin.

“She saw a likeminded soul who’d put up with the likes of you,” Booker spoke loudly over the pair of them, though he was finally grinning easily as he said it.

Nile eyed them all. Her job had been advertised and she’d written away for it. She’d sought it out. It was halfway to the end of the earth just getting to Lerwick. “How’d you end up at Lerwick?”

“Well, I had been known to sometimes overindulge in the devil’s drink.”

 _Gin,_ Nicky mouthed to Nile behind him.

“I’d been enjoying the hospitality of a card game populated by sailors, stood them a few rounds of drink to ease the pain of their losses, and by dint of poor luck, happened to unintentionally join their crew.”

Joe continued the tale, “What he’s not saying is he got so drunk he followed them onto their ship in the port of Marseille, passed out, had to work the decks while at sea – poorly, no doubt – and was dumped off the side at Lerwick with the cargo that was _meant_ to be there.”

“What made you decide to stay on Bressay as a keeper?” Nile asked him.

Booker smiled at her and it was friendly enough as he raised his glass in a sardonic toast, though there was an edge to it: “Family.”

And that was the last said on the matter, as Andy joined them and they tucked into dinner. After they were done, Andy leant back on her chair then stood with a stretch. “I’m taking Nile on first watch. See you at the bells, Joe. Book, get some sleep, you look like hell.”

The Frenchman waved them off with a rude gesture as Nile followed Andy out the door and towards the lighthouse itself.

“The night watches are a one-person job once your training’s done anyway. First watch begins at sunset then we rotate every four hours into second watch then third watch. You’ll do second watch every fifth day since you’ll have to wake up for it instead of staying up or waking early.”

It was difficult to pay proper attention to Andy while also looking everything inside the lighthouse. The steps leading upwards, the layers of paint over everything that turned every potential sharp edge or corner into dulled curves, the smell of brine, copper and burning kerosene. Nile realised she was smiling long after her lips had turned up at the corners. This was the adventure she was hoping for. She couldn’t wait to write to her brother.

“If you’re on watch, you’re not to go beyond the light room or the watch room without calling someone to take over for you. Ring this bell and we’ll send someone up. Emergencies only. Leaving your post’ll lose you your position without a second chance. You _never_ leave the watch unattended. Don’t worry, kid, you’ve got some training to do yet before you come to that.” Andy then picked up a thick log-book.

“We record everything. The weather, the ships that pass in and out of the Sound, the stores we use, the fuel levels, the state of the lens and the wicks, any maintenance, and anything else of note.” Andy offers her the book. “It’s the Journal-Book and it’s your head if you lose it. Have a read through, but not too long because it’s dull enough to send anyone to sleep and falling asleep on watch is another way to be quickly returned to the ship that brought you here.”

Andy then showed Nile the lens and its mechanisms, the gearing and clockwork that had to be wound and constantly maintained to ensure it never failed rotating in the Bressay Lighthouse’s particular rhythmic light characteristic. The lamp, its wick and fuel, the flame that had be at a certain height all night to ensure the lens functioned correctly. The secondary lamp that had to be ready in case the first one failed somehow. The warning bell that would sound if the fuel was low – which it should never be, not if they were doing their jobs. The gallery, which was the iron balcony around the Light Room, and the windows encasing it which had to have salt and muck cleaned constantly from them.

Finally it was time to light the lamp for the evening as the dusk light set in. Andy held out her lighter. “Here you go, kid. It’s bad luck not to light the lamp on your first watch.”

Nile took it, held the little flickering light to the wick until it caught, looked up at Andy and smiled, who twitched a small smile back. There it was. The flame that would grow and grow over the next half hour until it was the beacon that would keep sailors safe, warned away from crushing rocks and reckless tides, welcomed back into the harbour and home to their kin. It felt like as the flame grew on the wick, it grew inside her heart as well.

All while the light faded and the sun set on Nile’s first day on Bressay.

_7 October 1880_

_To my Misbegotten Sibling_

_Congratulate me, brother! For I am now a member of the noble family of wickies – that is what a lighthouse keeper is called! It has become entirely clear that I knew nothing about the profession at all and my mind is so full of new information that I am afraid everything I knew about anything else has been pushed out and forgotten. It seems at once both exciting and interesting and also boring and dull. I look forward to settling into my duties, which are numerous._

_I’ll tell you about my colleagues and the lighthouse itself so you can picture my new circumstances. The Principle Keeper is a forbidding woman named Andy. She reminds me of nothing so much as my captain during training, only she wavers between an obscure air and radiating friendly authority by turns. There are three Assistant Keepers. Nicky and Joe, more formally called Nicolò de Genova and Yusuf al-Kaysani, are a matched pair who are painfully in love. Lastly, the third Assistant Keeper is a Frenchman whose name is Sébastien but everyone here calls him Booker, so I shall refer to him from now on the same. So far he seems saltier than the ocean, but his humour when pushed is dry and clever. And now I am the fifth Keeper, called a Keeper-in-Training. I am sure we shall all get on well._

_The Bressay Lighthouse is a white tower sitting on a tall bluff overlooking the boundary between the entrance to Lerwick Harbour and the rough tides of the North Sea. You climb the 97 steps upwards to the Light Room and there sits the great lamp which illuminates the night skies for sailors arriving and departing. It was my great honor to light the wick on my first night, and apparently it is also good luck to do so. We work on a rotating shift system with duties spread between the Night Watch shifts and daily upkeep tasks – that seems to involve a lot of painting and maintenance of the lamp’s clockwork mechanisms and gears, since the salt air strips and rusts everything left uncared for. The Keeper’s cottage is a cosy two-bedroom setting, much lived in, but welcoming. Winter is yet to hit proper, but Joe swears that the cottage is a bastion of warmth against the worst of the North Sea winds._

_You can address any letters and packages care of the Bressay Lighthouse and they will arrive safe and sound, I am assured. Mail is collected and sent once a month along with our stores from the main island of Shetland. Since you will have received, hopefully, a glut of correspondence from me, I should warn you that my next batch will not arrive for some time but will surely be a weighty tome when it does and you will be sick to death of seeing my script._

_Next week I have a half-day and I plan to explore the island in more detail, so you may look forward to descriptions of flora and fauna and whatever drawings I can manage._

_Your beloved sister,_

  1. _Freeman, Wickie-in-Training_



It seemed the Provençal man Booker had been correct in his prediction of oncoming weather. After waking and writing to her brother over breakfast, Nile spent the day with Andy, being shown how to read the instruments in the weather station, a shuttered box standing outside the lighthouse and cottages on the bluff. She found the names of the devices – barometer and hygrometer and dewcell and thermograph – fascinating, and she recorded their measurements under Andy’s watchful gaze. But as the sun began its descent to the horizon and the temperature dropped, the fog seemed to rise and set in.

By the time Nile was awoken from a cat nap before her training on second watch, the fog was so thick that it was barely possible to see fifty feet away. The fog siren was airing, a deep horn sounding out over the water, warning ships away from the coastline. She dressed quickly in her warmest clothes, pulling on one of the thickly knitted sweaters Andy had called a gansey. The wool was so tightly and complexly stitched that it almost seemed a kind of armour. Though at least this protected Nile from the threat of nothing more than the cold.

She touched the ragged scar drawn along the curve of her throat, running her fingertips along its gnarled surface. The taste of blood curdled on her tongue and for a long moment she could smell the sharp copper of it in the air. A whistle sounded in the distance and Nile would have thought it the wind but that the wind had dropped to almost nothing, muffled by the heavy fog. She shivered and wrapped a scarf around her neck.

Nile joined Booker on second watch in the light room, and watched as he checked the clockworks, oiled the gearing, monitored the fuel, and timed the rotation of the lens. These tasks performed, he led her down to the watch room below and peered out into the night. The beaming light seemed to illuminate the fog so as to make it twist and turn, while overhead the full moon turned the dark of midnight into a strangely lit, eerie dusk. The thick soup outside was exacerbated by the sullen atmosphere radiating from the man standing next to her; it seemed to occasionally press up against the glass of the windows like a living thing that longed to seep inside. It played tricks on the eyes – Nile saw the hint of figures moving about in the roiling, shadowy clouds.

“It’s a bad luck night, full moon and fog. Makes sailors do foolish things, when the light’s a mess like this.” Booker thumbed his eyebrow and then huffed a sigh. “We’d better keep a wary eye out. At least the sea’s calm enough.”

They settled in the watch room, Booker with a mug of tea held cupped in his hands, Nile with the strongest coffee she could stand. He seemed disinclined to make conversation, face turned to the uncanny sight of the fog-drenched ocean lit up by the full moon and flashing light. Nile looked out for a short while but could feel the sleep she hadn’t quite shaken off tugging at her eyelids. Even the rhythmic fog siren wasn’t enough to keep her alert. Instead it seemed to lull her into a hypnotic state, pulsing in rhythm with the shifting mists. Damn it all to hell, she was not going to fall asleep on her very first try at second watch.

“Andy warned me second watch would be an experience but this is one for the books. With the early hour and the fog as well, you almost feel like there’s no one else left in the world.”

“Mm,” Booker hummed noncommittedly. “Almost.”

Well, that was a pointed comment if ever Nile had ever heard one. She gave him an unimpressed side-eye. “Look, I know it’s annoying but if I don’t talk to you, I’ll have to get up and pace the room instead. Which would you prefer?”

Taking a sip of his tea, Booker gave up in the face of her determination and leaned back in his chair. The light from the lanterns caught on the ragged scruff he hadn’t deigned to shave off his face as he turned his eyes towards her. “Well, what brings you here then.”

“I saw the advertisement and thought it would be an interesting job that I could do well.”

“Seems a strange place for a young woman to want employment. But then, that scar’s a strange mark for a young woman to have.”

Booker gave her neck a nod. So he _had_ noticed the scar, despite her raised collar and scarf. Nile resisted the impulse to pull them higher and tighter. He’d seen it, it was there, and there was little point hiding it. She’d found it least taxing to be straightforward about her military history and wounding. Best to get the story, short as it was, over with.

“I joined the army because I thought I could… help people, I suppose. My father was a soldier and I wanted to make his memory proud. Then I fought in the southern front of the Aureate Battle. Caught a stray blade to the neck. I was fortunate, very fortunate, so everyone says.” Though she had been doing her best to break the habit, Nile found she was rubbing at her neck.

Sometimes – often, she supposed – she dreamt she was there again, Dizzy clasping at her neck so tightly that Nile almost couldn’t breathe, Jordan standing over them in defence, the clamour of battle around them, and Nile’s blood pooling under her head and back, hot and wet. She could smell it as it bled out of her and before Dizzy clamped down on it, it had spurted onto her face and into her mouth. Sometimes she heard the whistling sound of the wind and it was close enough to the whistle blown to begin their offence that she was transported hundreds of miles and months into the past, cannon-fire booming and horses screaming. Fortunate, indeed.

Perhaps it was something in her tone, because Booker glanced at her and didn’t question her further on the subject.

“And besides the lighthouse itself, I’ve always wanted to visit an island like this,” she offered finally, dropping her hand to her lap. After breaking the silence and encouraging conversation, it seemed poor manners to turn mute so quickly. “I’m looking forward to my half day so I can begin seeing more of it.”

“I’ve not explored it much,” Booker admitted. “Andy’s seen it all and I prefer to leave Nicky and Joe’s private adventures, uh, private.”

“We ought to experience it together then,” Nile said, a spur of the moment idea. “The joy of exploration is sharing the discoveries, after all.”

Booker, in all his gruff and rumpled glory, looked like he was racking his mind for a reason as to why this shouldn’t be the case and was most disgruntled to find that not only was his melancholic spleen failing him but that he was unexpectedly interested in the suggestion. It was a series of complicated but fleeting emotions that crossed his expressive face until finally he gave Nile a surprised but accepting raised eyebrow. “It seems just the thing we ought to do.”

And that seemed to be his way of agreeing.

With that, the time passed much more quickly. Between maintaining the fuel and the clockworks, documenting any passing ships in the Journal-Book, and keeping watch through the thick fog, they sat with their heads together to make suggestions of what they would like to do and where on the island they had longed to go. They ran through the rota and picked the best times and days for their explorations, matched dawn to the rising otters, dusk to the cormorants hunting shoals of fish, and a rare free afternoon together to tramping to the other side of the island where Booker said puffins nested.

Then they traded tales and stories until the bells marked the end of their shift, wherein Nicky arrived to begin third watch. And when Booker said goodnight in his rough low voice before Nile settled in to sleep in her cot, it was met by a spark of warmth in her chest.

From then on, they explored the island as veritable naturalists, as Andy put it. Andy, Joe and Nicky would join them on occasion, when shifts allowed, but always the two of them at the very least. With the exception of the seal colonies, which Booker begged off with a headache, they discovered Bressay together. One day they would visit the Ord cliffs, the winds buffeting them about as they crested the rising hill to the dramatic coast of the island, the next it was a trip to the Veng Burn waterfall, where the water cascaded into the sea. They passed fishermen’s cottages and small, windswept farms. The stout native ponies enraptured Nile so Booker snuck into a vegetable garden once to unearth a carrot to lure the ponies close enough for Nile to stroke their velvety noses. He had a knack for attracting animals that he seemed strangely to take little interest in, except for that it delighted Nile.

They watched the playful otters and the small puffins on the hills, climbed to the edges of cliffs and saw the sea birds dive into the ocean for fish. The clouds would dance past their heads, the wind jostling them in the vast sky, and when the sun came out, the island was a vision of greens and blues, salt sprays and the scents of the natural world. Nile felt as far from war and battles as it was possible to be, her blood invigorated by their explorations. The lighthouse stood like a sentinel at the island’s edge, warning the world away, guarding the island’s occupants from outsiders as much as it guarded sailors from the island’s ragged rocks.

Curiously, Booker’s reticence seemed to come and go with his moods. As they spent time together, Nile began to suspect his dour nature was less his normal state and more a habit he had fallen into. When he forgot to be grim, he was easily charming and prone to smiling, the corners of his blue eyes crinkling with warmth. Then, as if he was alarmed by his own delight, he would retreat into silence by way of a cynical comment like a startled turtle into its shell. Nile, bemused by this, decided not to prod him into happiness. He’d enjoy himself or he wouldn’t; it wasn’t her responsibility to improve him. Perhaps it would be a new habit he could learn.

The island’s size meant it didn’t take too long for them to come to the Lord’s manor on the far side. The Laird’s manor, as Booker called it. Not so grand as she thought a manor would be, though it was easily the biggest and most decadent structure on Bressay. Booker circled around it, though Nile had thought they were welcome to explore the grounds. She queried this, and Booker gave the distant castle a revolutionary’s glare, his blinking eyelids the thudding drop of a guillotine blade. “The Laird’s not to be trifled with. Best he doesn’t know you from a bar of soap.”

“Why? Does he know you?”

“Wandered on the land once or twice while he was at home. Made his acquaintance, such as it is.”

Nile surveyed the manor and the land around it. It seemed unoccupied at the moment, no movement on the grounds, nor lights in any of the windows. It looked cold and empty.

“Does he stay often?

Booker just shrugged, his caginess making an unwelcome return as he walked on, leaving Nile to follow.

They avoided the lee side of the island from then on, if only because it settled Booker’s temperament, and ventured as far as the causeway before their approaching shifts and the call of dinner lured them back to the lighthouse. As they rambled about the island, Nile found her appetite grew and she savoured her meals like she hadn’t since she first left home. Or perhaps since she first struck another person with the aim to kill. But now it seemed she could taste the salty herring for the first time and know that they had been caught by sailors from Lerwick. The bread they soaked soup up with had been made with their own hands. The vegetables had been pulled freshly from their small patch or pickled by the farmers nearby. Honey had never tasted sweeter. Every morsel a blessing. The weight inside her chest lightened with each day and she had fewer and fewer occasions of hearing the distant whistle, feeling the prickle of sour sweat on her back. And when she woke, even from a violent dream, she knew where she was and was happy to wake there. She was surrounded by her team, and she was content.

And as Nile’s love for the island grew, so did her regard for Booker. It did her little good to caution wariness or sense to herself. As soon as she did, he would point out a particular croft or make a wryly funny comment or trip over an unexpected stone and huff like a ruffled cat, and the wariness faded into glowing warmth and each time she slipped a little further and further.

_Dearest brother,_

_You bag of rats, I can’t believe you were awarded the scholarship! Are they aware you will be a constant nuisance and distraction to all your fellow students? Do they truly know the scoundrel they are letting loose amongst their innocent flock? My word, they have no idea what they’ve brought upon themselves. I know it is some years off, but I promise I will be there to celebrate your graduation, if only to see the faces of everyone who will have suffered your presence all that time._

_In the meantime, please enjoy this illustration Joe drew of the lighthouse. I had mentioned I wanted to send you a lithograph so you could see my new home, if only I could have one made, and he has done this instead, which is much better! Do you see me at its base? I was washing the salt and dirt from the exterior, which builds up regularly, and it’s an entirely unglamourous task. But Joe’s skilled hand has made it look romantic, like I am hard at work at a most noble profession. He very kindly has not shown me tripping over the steps or being bothered for my lunch by a gang of seagulls._

_After I came home, I know I was ~~unwell~~ not myself for a time. But Bressay has been a blessing. I am calm and happy, I am making a difference here and it is far better than I ever expected. Living with the crew is like being part of our own small make-shift family and though I miss you all, I want you to know that I am not lonely here at the edge of the world. Please tell everyone, I know they were concerned about my choice to come here. _

_I am so proud of you._

_Your loving and well-lit sister,_

_Nile_

Thus time passed. Slowly and with often dull tasks that set Nile’s hands to work and her mind to rest. She fell into the rhythms of the island and the roster of the lighthouse, grew to know her team and slotted in like a well-oiled gear. She discovered first watch was her least favourite shift but she enjoyed it with Joe, who was of all the crew the most sanguine and joyful. Andy was wryly funny and a font of knowledge, Nicky was calm and reassuring, Booker was routinely a grump, but Joe was prone to jokes and cards and stories – he enlivened the moroseness of the hours after sunset.

The long hours of second watch were best when she sat with Andy, whose stalwartness and experience made the witching hours pass with ease. She seemed to like hearing Nile talk about her home and her family and her thoughts on the world, even when they disagreed or debated the point. Between arguments Andy would quiz her on the prisms of the lens, the mechanics of the gearing, how to spot jumps in the clockwork. During the later hours, Andy would show Nile maps of the harbour and the sound, the islands around them, the prevailing winds and seasonal currents. She pointed out reefs and particularly worrisome underwater rocks, the location of sunken wrecks. Then, during the day, she’d take Nile out to the bluff and have her point out where those mapped features were actually placed on the landscape. Nile learned how to read the currents, where the tide was flowing, how the sets of waves were crashing in. She fell in love with the ocean during those lessons and discovered the peace of gazing at distant horizons, while Andy watched the ocean with a gimlet eye.

Third watch was her favourite and it was with Nicky that Nile found peace in the early hours of the morning. Nile rose in the dark and watched the sun rise from the watch room with Nicky sitting beside her, discovering the joy of a night ending safely and the light being switched off as they greeted the freshness of a new day. She savoured the restfulness of their thoughtful silences and meditative conversations and Nicky’s coffee, steam rising from the mug, as they soaked in the quiet before the rest of the world woke up. It was on one such night that Nile raised the question of the approaching festive date.

“How do you celebrate Yule here?” Nile had been musing on the topic, despite herself. This time last year she had been sitting in a soggy field, muck and mud up to her shins, slapping insects off her face, wondering when the whistle would sound.

Nicky shrugged. “It’s not an occasion Joe and I have traditionally celebrated. Andy and Booker, as you can imagine, are not particularly enthusiastic about those kinds of things.”

They were in the middle of sorting and maintaining the spare clockwork parts. The gears, like everything else, would rust if left unattended for long and it was vital they had them ready for any emergency replacements that cropped up. So they were checked and cleaned and greased regularly. It was the sort of task that inspired slow thoughtful conversation. Mindless and repetitive and soothing.

“How did you and Joe-” _Come to be here. Come to meet, at that._

“We were on opposing sides of the Lesser War. You’ve heard of it, yes?”

It was a war that Nile knew a little about, but had nothing to do with. It was on the other side of the world, foreign countries with foreign interests that didn’t impact her own country’s politics. They’d studied the tactics somewhat, and the ferocity the invading force brought to bear. Nicky watched her nod and gave her a sober, forlorn smile.

“I had been taught his people were my enemy. Not just the enemy of my land, but the enemy of my soul. It was therefore my duty to destroy him. His family. His land. His history. I believed what I was told without question and that was my sin, I think. Then I was at war and Joe was at the other end of my sword. He fought bravely but I was seconds from killing him when a great fire broke out in the city. It burned savagely and killed many. We fled into the wilderness with only each other for company. We fought each other, hurt each other many times. But we were lost together, wounded and with no one else to rely upon. We came to understand each other. I unlearned many things and Joe was relatively patient while I learned.” Nicky took a deep breath which he released in a sigh. It was difficult to picture him in battle. Nile had seen him put out small dishes of water for tired bees. “His forgiveness was the truest act of grace I have ever seen on this earth. It’s a difficult thing to discover, that you have hurt others in your ignorance. All I can do now to make up for it is offer my love. To Joe and to the world.”

“That simple?”

Nicky gave a very continental shrugging gesture. “There’s nothing simple about it. But also yes, it’s that simple.”

Nile focused on her little rag and gear. It was easier to think with something to occupy her hands. It also allowed space for the worst memories to drift in like fog.

She’d joined up because she thought it would bring her closer to her father somehow. His memory, his bravery, everything he might have taught her if he hadn’t died. The money helped her mother and brother, training had been satisfyingly hard work and being with her unit had felt right. Nile had loved the teamwork, the comradery, the challenges and how even the hardest parts of training had been easier with Dizzy and Jordan at her shoulders. She’d _believed_ that they could make the world better.

The trouble, Nile thought morosely, was that sooner or later being in an army meant they’d send you off to a war and you didn’t get to decide if it was one you thought was fair and just. And then it turned out that the people they were supposedly defending didn’t give a damn for Freedom and Glory. They chiefly worried about bringing the harvest in before the wet season and had opinions on the soldiers who trampled their fields, no matter which colors they wore. Nile had always believed that working with villagers, building trust and good will, was the best way to bring about real change and lasting peace. But it was hard to befriend a local whose home had been burned down with their children inside. Nile had found it hard to look them in the face while she gave a ‘for the greater good’ speech and they were too busy digging through the ashes to listen anyway. The next week that local would be reaching for a sword instead of a plough and it was anyone’s guess who they’d decide was their enemy. And then the army would march on to the next village.

The actual Yuletide engagement and her subsequent wounding had almost come as a relief.

Nile swallowed and realised she had been staring at her hands, lost in the past. She busied herself with the grease again.

Nicky let her gather her thoughts, quietly brushing the small teeth of a gear.

“Last year, I was in the midst of a campaign during Yule,” she said finally. “We had a short truce. No fighting for one night and the officers gave out extra rations for the occasion. Wasn’t much to enjoy since it was all riddled with mould.”

Nile had eaten them anyway. They all had. That was what you did – ate what the officers gave you and didn’t ask questions about whether it might kill you, whether it was mouldy biscuits or orders on the field.

“How would you like to celebrate _this_ yule?” Nicky’s question broke the memory, stopped Nile from swallowing reflexively against the ghost of gritty, rank crumbs at the back of her throat.

“Well, traditionally at home we’d have a lunch with the whole family. We sing, play some games…”

They’d be preparing for it now. Her mother already cleaning the house, dusting the undersides of shelves to make sure not a speck of dirt could be found anywhere, because the heavens knew her cousin would be looking for it.

“Excellent, we shall have a traditional Yule this year then.”

“But you said you haven’t really done anything for it before?” Nile pointed out, confused.

“All traditions begin somewhere.”

They exchanged small, growing smiles.

Yule became a project between Nile and Nicky, Joe sometimes offering his own suggestions. Nile had brought up the idea of a tree, though the practicality of a Yule tree was made difficult by the lack of appropriate greenery on Bressay. They decided to make do with an inverted stump, dried out and then hung with vines and what baubles they could gather. Gift-giving was decided against but they would have a feast of a lunch. Nicky planned the menu after taking stock of their stores. He sent Joe to the mainland with a list of supplies to purchase. Joe complained that his role in the occasion was to be packhorse and errand boy, so they told him he could choose the table decorations which he said was most gracious of them.

All five sat down at the table for the meal. They didn’t often eat all together, with rosters and errands and chores moving them about like hands on a clock. So it was a rare delight to sit as one single group and savour the tender roast lamb and vegetables, drenched in lashings of Nicky’s gravy, sopped up with fresh bread. To each savour a glass of spicy red wine and exchange jokes, tease each other, steal morsels from each other’s plates. Finally, the food was eaten and the wine was drunk. Joe, full of stomach and effusive of spirit, began singing. Nile joined in enthusiastically with a tenor like a bell and Nicky followed, a trio of voices singing in harmony.

Andy and Booker, less inclined to songs and earnestness, decided retreat was the better part of valour and withdrew to the lighthouse with a dram of whisky each and as much shortbread as they could carry.

The old year faded into the new year. And all around them, even on the rare occasion that snowflakes flurried down, the ocean ceaselessly flowed around them. Nile wasn’t sure when it happened, but she no longer registered the rhythmic crashing of waves, nor noticed the brine in the air or the salt spray of a high tide. She felt she had been made part of it instead. The tension that had coiled around her neck, weighing upon her shoulders, faded and dissipated like the morning fog in the rising sunlight. The army had taught her to hurry up and wait, wait, wait, wait, always waiting for the next fight, the next unexpected weapon, the next memory she would pray to forget. Here, there were no weapons. Instead, she watched ants industriously take apart a dead moth. She sat still enough to see delicate little lizards flicker past her on the rocks. All around her, birds hopped and flew and sent ringing calls into the wind. Their little island a haven, girt by the ocean, endless and protective.

On a cold night, Nile was asleep after coming off first watch with Nicky when Booker shook her awake. He whispered so as not to wake up Andy, who slept soundly in the bed opposite, “Nile, _mon ami_ , wake up, wake up.”

“What time’s it?” She muttered, cloudy with sleep.

“Just before third bells, quick, quickly, get up,” He said quickly as he urged her from her bed. “Get your coat and come with me, I have something you must see.”

Nile staggered as she pulled a gansey on, then her coat and a knitted cap over the scarf she had tied over her hair. She was still blinking tiredly when Booker held up a strip of cloth.

“I want to surprise you. Do you trust me?” Booker asked, the hint of an eager smile like a rising sun on his lips.

Taken aback by his uncharacteristic enthusiasm, Nile nodded and allowed him to tie the blindfold gently over her eyes.

Nile was anchored by Booker’s hands as they walked out into the frigid winds. It seemed he didn’t take her far, as she recognised the short walk to the highest cliff nearby. There he stopped her with his hands on her shoulders and removed the blindfold. It took Nile a moment to blink her eyes clear as the wind whipped tears from then and then she gasped.

Above their heads, great waves of vivid green and pink-edged light rippled across the sky. Nile had not dared hope to see the Northern Lights, though Andy said there was every chance she would. She had tried to imagine what they would look like, but the awe they evoked in the moment made Nile feel like a child, a spark of a person in a truly massive natural church, convex and vaulted and containing multitudes.

“The locals call them the Mirrie Dancers. The great lights,” Booker had to just about yell the words over the winds gusting in from the sea. Booker’s face, turned to the sky, was mesmerised. Nile knew she ought to be looking at the natural wonder as well, but could not help but watch the flickering ethereal green waves reflected in his eyes for a moment first. “They’re a rare sight. A blessing. Do you know, there’s a – a legend that for selkies, the seal folk, that even in the ocean depths, they see these lights dance and they dance with them, swimming in the great kelp forests and so nimble, they flicker with the lights as their partners.”

Nile felt both massive and tiny, multivalent and simple, a part of the natural world and set apart from it in her wonder. She opened her arms, leaned into the wind on the edge of the bluff. It was so strong that it seemed to support her body and Nile was held in place on the border of sky and earth and sea as green curtains of light danced overhead and waves crashed below, her braids whipping behind her and her face tingling from the cold. She laughed, joyful, and all grief and woe that had ever settled in her heart was forgotten. The world was full of wonders and beauty beyond measure. How could she do anything else but love it?

Perhaps she leaned forward a little too far without realising, alarming Booker, because he reached for her suddenly, pressing one hand against her ribs. Feeling the pressure of his fingers spread on her even through her gansey, Nile breathed in and felt delight rush through her again, the sudden heat of adrenaline, the burning sparks of something new and precious. She turned into the shelter of his thick arms and broad shoulders, and held his gaze, hypnotised by the silvery depths of blue in them, wanting to catch him, keep him, keep him bare and hers. Caught and held so he would not turn, as fae green danced around them and the waves crashed below. Even as they moved together, inexorably towards each other, Nile only shut her eyes to the sight of him when their lips met and Booker clutched her close, so tightly that she could not forget his strength.

For one breath-taking moment, she felt his lips move with hers, felt the rough scrape of his stubble and the warmth of him, the rushing of her blood, so alive and thrumming through her veins. Spellbound, charmed and ensorcelled – Nile would have found no lesser words to describe the flight of her heart. Then Booker froze and pulled away. He turned away from her, paused as though and said loud enough to be heard above the wind, “My watch starts soon. I must go back.”

And turn to go back he did, his face a picture of – what it was in all its colours, Nile could not say. Sadness? Anger? Fear? Longing? Something rich and strange, so distant from the friend she knew.

“Book! Booker! Stop! Please!”

In the face of her pleading, he stopped and faced her, or at least turned his face in the direction of hers.

“Nile, it’s my fault. I forgot myself.” He ran a hand through his hair, over his face, his eyes meeting hers and then flitting away, “I should not have brought you, I should not have– You’d do better to forget this folly.”

How quickly the tingling of one’s skin could so easily turn to prickles of unease, flights of birds beating against one’s ribcage falling in ungainly dives.

“Of course not. I apologise for my forwardness. Of course not.” They were nonsense words. Was he even able to hear her over the wind? Nile did not know what to do with her hands or the flush of heat on her face or the prickle in her eyes. Her stomach sank into her shoes. And because she was no coward, she would not look away. Or avoid hoping he would correct himself. She wasn’t wrong, she knew she wasn’t. He would think better of his words and rush back to her, call himself a fool and she would kiss him and–

But he said nothing, only lowered his eyes and walked back down the path to the lighthouse, not looking back once, not even when he shut the door behind him. Nile let him go. She would not force him to stay. She stood at the cliff and watched the lights until the magic was spent and the night faded into darkness and stars. And if her eyes watered a little, it was because of the icy wind.

She slept afterwards, only a little, but she slept. She would not lie awake crying in the dark and so made herself remember the tricks she had learned in the military to bring on a state of rest. And she woke resolving to not let the foolishness of the Mirrie Dancers be a wedge between them. She would let her unwanted feelings fade and if they would not, she would burn them out. It was not in her to pine from a distance and if Booker would not meet her halfway, she would not be ruled by an unrequited desire. Thus she settled the matter in her mind, and told her wilfully skipping heart to follow that lead.

In a kind world it would be that simple.

She woke for breakfast and was met by Joe, baking rolls in the stove. Booker joined them finally from the end of third watch, muttering a low greeting and sitting at the table with his shoulders curled in. He drank his tea and Nile pretended she didn’t see him tip his flask in the cup when he believed no one was looking. They had previously made vague plans to revisit the puffins that morning; it seemed increasingly unlikely that Booker was in the mood for a ramble.

“Will you want some of the rolls packed for your morning tea?” Joe asked absentmindedly as he packed away the butter.

“I’m going to paint the rails.”

Nile was still for a moment at Booker’s response. So it _would_ be like that.

“You hate painting,” Joe queried, confused. “And it’s your half day. I thought you were…”

He glanced between Booker and Nile, trailing off. Booker said nothing, shrugging on his coat and exiting with alacrity. Joe watched him go and then turned to Nile.

Nile met his gaze, giving her best ‘what of it’ face, and he held up his hands in surrender. “I suppose I was mistaken.”

And that was how they spent the day. Booker avoiding all of them, painting the balustrades that led down to the shore like it was a life-or-death task, while Nile reminded herself that they were going to be cordial friends and nothing more while she did the monthly stock-take in the store-room with Andy. It was mind-numbingly boring, counting candles and lamp wicks and cans of goods, and provided Nile with plenty of time to stare into the middle distance and ponder all of her mistakes, current and past and probable future ones as well.

Her mood must have been palpable because Andy seemed compelled to make conversation. She hadn’t even said anything on the awful day Nile had woken up from a sleep filled with nightmares of Dizzy and Jordan dying, of her mother weeping in the middle of a battlefield, her brother lost in a tent of wounded soldiers, calling her name though she could not find him anywhere. Nile spent the day snapping at everyone, even Booker who had offered to walk with her along the shore. He’d silently withdrawn to the clockworks in the lighthouse, his preferred haven of mechanics and parts, and Nile had felt angry and awful and ready to explode. She’d sworn and Nicky, surprised, dropped a jar of flour that shattered over the floor. The sharp crack of the broken jar had sent her hurtling into the past and she’d fled the cottage, fled the battlefield, fled the memories she could see lurking in the corners.

Andy had come out and stood next to her, looking out at the horizon. Didn’t touch her or try to make her talk.

But this time, perhaps because it involved Booker who Andy regarded as something between a best friend and a ragged stray she had fed and therefore felt responsible for, Andy spoke up without letting the silence drag on for long.

“I took the job here because I wanted to be alone,” she said. “I lost someone. It made it difficult for me to be around people without resenting them and as a result, hurting them. Nicky and Joe will attest to my temperament when they were hired. It was some time before we reached an accord. Even longer before we became friends.”

She looked out at the horizon, eyes flickering over the ocean, before she turned away abruptly. “Come on. Might as well check the stores while we’re here.”

Nile followed Andy into the storeroom. It would help, she knew, to do something mindless with her hands. It would distract her from her thoughts and drown out the whistles that haunted her. Andy began counting a box of bottled oils. Nile picked up the storeroom notebook and began tallying up sacks of flour. For a time, the quiet was only interrupted by the breaking of waves on nearby rocks. 

“Booker was like that when I found him,” Andy finally said, putting the box away back on the shelf, glass rattling inside. “How he even got to Lerwick he couldn’t tell me, and he was a second from being thrown out of the bar and into the harbour. I pitied him, to tell you the truth. Didn’t think he was worth much besides trouble. And I suppose I didn’t think he’d last long. Half expected him to just disappear one night. It was a half-year before he said anything about his wife and children.”

Nile froze. Andy looked at her and nodded to confirm her own words.

“Their passing was what had led him to the bottle. Grief’s hungry, you see. It needs to be fed.” She was very far away as she spoke, the words dredged up from some dark and lonely abyss. “Time’s what does it. The years pass and they’ll take your tears away if you let them, but the cost is they take your love and your memories with them. Time takes it all away. To keep your love, you feed your grief until it becomes – until everything you hold onto becomes a burden you carry. It becomes a greedy beast. And so do you.”

Andy gave her a warning look. “Be careful, Nile.”

Nile toyed with the pages of the notebook in her hands. She’d mistaken Andy’s intentions. She’d just thought Andy was protective of Booker. Not that – that it would also be a warning about him.

“You’re a good kid, Nile. I’m glad you’re here. Now count the flour again, I’m very certain we don’t have four thousand pounds of it.” Then she cuffed Nile over the head and walked out.

Nile sat there for some time, staring at her tally marks and final count notation and the way they didn’t match up at all.

But life was not permitted to stop just because Nile had delivered to herself an embarrassing moment, or because she had perhaps lost a friend; that night, she was required in the watch room while Booker fixed a jumping gear in the light room. They awkwardly danced around each other on the stairs, Booker stepping to one side as Nile stepped to the same side. She attempted to laugh it off while he remained steadfastly distant, not meeting her eyes, standing finally to one side and gesturing for her to pass. As she looked up the stairs after him, she saw him take his flask from his pocket and take a long pull from it, despite the hard rule of no liquor while on duty.

Nile felt like a stone was lodged in her chest. She watched the ranging light, flashing out across the ocean, into the distance. The darkness seemed heavier for once, swallowing the light as it passed. The light itself was not a message of safe passage but a warning: _stay away, stay away, stay away._

__

The next day, as though the landscape itself had taken inspiration from her mood, the first great storm of winter rolled in.

Waking from her rest, Nile could hear the shrieking winds and the groaning of the cottage, the heavy drumming of rain, and the rolling thunder overhead. Andy had warned her about the winter storms, about their destructive power, and the responsibilities the wickies bore in not only keeping a steady light in grim conditions but also in rescuing any foundering sailors that they could. Nile had read all the journals she could and asked Joe, the best storyteller of the crew, to regale her with tales of venturing out into waves as thick and tall as buildings, and finding by chance lucky sailors and bringing them to shore. The long nights spent with the shivering fisherman, huddled in the cottage, clutching at mugs of hot tea topped up with whisky, asking if their lost crewmates had been found. Now they would be her tales too.

She rose and quickly dressed, eager to be of as much use as she could. In this, the strength of her arms, her quick wits, her courage – it would all do good not by hurting someone, but by returning them safely to land.

Andy was in the watch room, where they all joined her. The wind whipped fat pellets of rain against the glass and they landed with heavy thuds like a stuttering gun. Nile could hear, for a moment, her squad calling orders and responses, could feel the heat and dust on her face. Andy’s voice rose above them and Nile blinked quickly, pushed her mind back into the present as best she could.

“Joe, Nicky, you’re on first boat duty. Nile, Booker, you’ll back them up if needed, and then swap duties after. Don’t start,” she held up a hand to Booker as he opened his mouth to say something. “Nile needs a partner, and you’re who we have.”

Booker seemed to give in, though he retained a mulish glint to his eyes.

Nile stayed silent at the exchange. Booker tossed her one unreadable look and stomped out onto the parapet. Andy seemed unconcerned, turning back to her logbook, making notes and checking measurements from the weather station outside. Joe followed Booker out, calling his name, and they did not return. It was a calmer Nicky who led Nile out and down to their land-docked lifeboats. He showed her again where the oars were stored safely away from the weather and how the thick ropes kept the boats in place despite the pull of the wind and tides. There was little to add from the last time she had been shown them, but his measured explanations were a serene balm against Nile’s rising worries.

Finally, he spoke on Booker’s inexplicable attitude: “Don’t worry about Booker. He’ll do his duty, though he’ll cuss us all out for it.”

The tide rolled in and in and in. A king tide, higher than anything Nile had seen so far. The waves crashed with booming sprays, making the very land they stood on shudder and shake. Though the lifeboats were held on land for now, they seemed to rock like they could feel the pull of the storm.

“Why is he…?”

“He believes he’s cursed. He told me once, when deep in his cups. In confidence, I suppose, although I have warned the others also. He said the ocean itself hates him, will not suffer his presence and that it will take anyone he loves.” Nicky pushed his drenched hair out of his face and he was serious as stone as he continued, “And so unless it is the direst of circumstances, he will not enter the sea. Joe tried to toss him in once, when his first few months, when we thought it was a joke or a prank, and he knocked Joe out for trying.”

How had Nile not known this? In all their explorations, Booker had said nothing. Though it wasn’t like they had so much as dipped a toe into the salt water of the sea. In fact, now that she considered it, was it by chance that they had always stood far above and away from the ocean, watching from a distance, or exploring inland?

“Come, we may not get a chance to eat a proper meal for as long as the storm lasts so we should enjoy it now.” And so they went back to the cottage, prepared a hearty stew, and waited. They took turns sitting with Andy, who would not leave the watch room, and kept vigil over the lamp and the ocean beyond the harbour.

The light required constant attention. Now, more than ever, it was vital that the flame not dip too low or too high, that the gears and clockwork ticked steadily along, and the lens cast the light out, sweeping across the ocean and guiding wayward ships home. Andy explained the best and worst outcomes (a passing squall and no shipwrecks, or a lasting storm and disastrous tides washing boats seeking shelter onto razor sharp rocks). She would stay on watch, guiding their efforts, until she was satisfied the weather had run the worst of its course.

“What if it lasts for days?”

“Then so will we.”

The first day, while fierce, was only the prologue. It took until the second night for the storm to hit its full stride. The tall, thunderous waves became deafening, even inside the cottage, the rain fell in nonstop sheets, and though the island had remained dark all day, the onset of night brought on gusts of wind that seemed to threaten to blow everything, nailed down or not, away into the abyss. The crew had rested in short breaks, taking catnaps when they could, but Nile still felt tired grittiness behind her eyelids, and weariness was beginning to settle in on all their faces. Then Joe came tumbling into the cottage calling for them to ready themselves, a fishing boat was making for the harbour but listing badly, Andy expected it to founder within minutes. She knew the boat, knew of the crew, knew there would be nine men aboard. Nine souls.

Both lifeboats would row out for them. Nicky and Joe embraced, held their foreheads together, kissed a gentle kiss, and then strode out the door. Their courage, the strength they found in each other, was only further emphasized by the sight they left behind. Booker was hunched in his chair, broad shoulders slumped even as he unscrewed his wretched flask and took a long swig. He gave Nile a red-eyed, desolate look.

“I’ll go. I’ll row out for them if you stay ashore.” Booker’s voice cracked, and though pitiful, it inspired not a single inch of pity within Nile. “If you promise not to follow.”

Nile stood and said only, “You’re a fool. I will do my duty to the sailors of Lerwick.” And left him there to decide whether he could do his.

_The Tale of the Fisherman’s Daughter and her Selkie Husband_

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived by the sea. Her father was a fisherman, her brothers were fisherman, her uncles were fisherman, and it had been this way for generations. Her mother knitted their thick woollen jumpers with patterns to protect them from the ocean’s grim moods and from the wind, rain, and cold. She taught the girl how to knit the jumpers. She taught the girl how to make their traditional fish stew. She taught the girl how to mend the nets. She taught the girl their songs and stories. The girl had no interest in these things. She was curious and bold and, most of all, bored. She wanted to travel and have adventures and see the world. She couldn’t, of course. They had little money and besides, she was required at home.

The girl grew into a young woman, filled with frustration. On the day her mother died, the young woman knew she would live there forever and never leave. She ran from the house and sat in the low shore break and wept. For her mother and for herself. She wished for happiness and joy. Seven tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped into the incoming tide. Seven sets of seven waves rolled in. Seven times she told herself to get up and stop being a child.

Before she could bring herself to rise, she saw a young man emerging from the waves, where no one had been swimming. He had golden hair and blue eyes that crinkled in the corners. He was handsome and broad and very naked, except for the dark pelt he carried, which meant she could either look away entirely or only look at his face. She chose his face. It was very handsome, after all.

“Who are you?”

He stared thoughtfully for a moment before seeming to decide, “You can call me Sébastien.”

“Are you here for me?”

He nodded and knelt in the water with her, taking her hands. He kissed her fingers while he looked in her eyes. Mesmerised, she felt her grief fade into the distance, like it had belonged to another person in another life. Sébastien smiled and she foolishly fell in love.

For three days they met at dawn and spent the sunlight hours together. She stole some of her brother’s clothing for him to wear and while she was gone, Sébastien hid the pelt he carried from the water with him. Then Sébastien walked with her along the sand and amongst the trees. She brought him food, which he sampled curiously. He asked her questions about the horses and the sheep. He walked barefoot on the grass and his eyes wrinkled with joy. He became enamoured with the young woman and her life on land, and the young woman discovered that she was equally enthralled as she saw it anew through his eyes.

At the end of the third day, he kissed her and said, “I cannot keep coming.”

“Why?” She gripped tightly to his hand. “What do you mean?”

“Are you not happy? Have you not discovered the joy in your life?” He looked out to the blue of the ocean, which reflected in the depths of his eyes. “You have found all you wished for.”

The young woman had not known they were on borrowed time and said desperately, “Is there no way for you to stay with me?

Sébastien considered the horizon. Then turned his back to it. “You must keep this to keep me.”

He held out the thick fur pelt. She took it without a second thought. She led him to an abandoned fishing shack nearby and ensconced him there. Then she hid his skin where he would not find it. She knew she shouldn’t. The seal folk weren’t meant to be kept. But Sébastien wanted to stay with her. She asked him why and he said they meant to be together, that the call of her was stronger than the call of the sea. They were both young and reckless with bravado.

Their days filled with sunlight and laughter and debates and adventure. Together, they slipped into love, like seals, so clumsy on land, sliding gracefully into water.

He took the name le Livre as well, because he was fascinated by the pages of books, by words and ink and their stories. He asked her father for permission to marry, although they had already sworn their vows to each other again before a king tide under a full moon and she wore his pelt like a cape draped over her shoulders. She swore the strange words promising to be true, to never forsake what had once belonged to the ocean, and Sébastien swore that on his life he would never leave her, and they danced as the waves tickled their ankles and they made love as luminescent bubbles broke around their undulating bodies.

They also married in a church, little as that meant to them.

The young woman’s life felt like a dream. She wasn’t boring like the other villagers, she had been _chosen_ by the sea, by one of the seal folk who no one else would even admit existed. Sébastien would tell her tales of the deep tides, the swaying kelp forests, the schools of silvery fish. They were lost in each other. Everyone else was an interloper. Everyone else was a ghost. The young woman was enchanted. She could see no one but him.

Sometimes Sébastien would go out on the fishing trips with her brothers. They insisted he was a good luck charm, that they always brought in the best catches when he was on the deck. Even though some of the sailors were afraid of him. He was too clever, too quick, charming and distant by turns. Sometimes he woke with a strange look in his eyes and disappeared from dawn until dusk. He would return and hold her, say that the ocean was calling him home but he was not ready to go. And indeed he could not go, he said, for the young woman held his heart and soul. She had sworn to keep him, he reminded her.

The young woman fell pregnant and had a son. Then another, and another. It was the joy of her life to hold them in her arms, to feel Sébastien’s lips kiss her forehead as he stood watch over them. All her boys had strangely webbed toes, the lining of the skin between their fingers longer than most. They loved to swim, spending hours in the ocean. Sometimes she had to force them in for dinner. Sébastien said it was normal, that they were blessed with the ocean’s love. Many of the other children weren’t allowed to play with them and she had heard the cruel rumours that they ate raw fish plucked straight from the sea, that they would dive too deep for too long for it to be normal, that they were all unnatural and to be avoided.

The young woman felt her grip on Sébastien becoming tenser. He spent longer and longer walking the shoreline and his sleep grew more and more restless. He came home and held her tightly, whispered reminders of her promise. She would keep him, she would keep him, she would keep him. She had sworn it.

It was seven years, seven months, and seven days after they first met when Sébastien went out with her brothers for fish. It was a day like any other, only as night began to fall did the storm appear on the horizon. As the woman and the boys ate dinner, the clouds began to grow heavy and dark overheard and she was just finishing her meal when she heard a long, rolling rumble of thunder. It heralded an onslaught of wind and rain unlike anything she had ever experienced in her life. The storm raged for days. It seemed to last forever, as the rain lashed in heavy sheets and the lightning cracked deafeningly overhead. Hail fell in heavy, frightening thuds. Sometimes the shutters on the windows blew in and the latches could barely hold them against the wind. The shingles on their roof blew off and the rain leaked in. The woman and her boys huddled under blankets and prayed for it to end.

Three days after that first rumble of thunder, the sun rose on a clearing sky and a calm sea. Yet the fishing fleet did not reappear. The shore was littered with flotsam and jetsam, so the people of their town began cleaning the debris, always keeping an eye on the now still ocean, always praying to see sails appear.

Finally, one lonely boat appeared on the horizon, slowly growing larger as it limped back to shore. As it grew closer, the woman saw that it was her brothers’ boat. She fell to her knees, sending gratitude to the heavens. But when the boat docked, only one ragged, exhausted man stumbled from its bow. A man from the village – not Sébastien nor one of her brothers. All had perished in the wild storm, taken by the sea, he said. It was a miracle he survived at all. But the woman knew otherwise. He had been left alive to taunt her, to tell her that the ocean always reclaimed what it was owed and took more besides in interest.

It took the woman some time to hear the wailing that was rising from her own lungs, escaping her lips, and to feel that she had fallen to her knees. Her love, her life, was taken from her. The ocean had grown greedy and taken him back and taken her family with him.

She was alone with three young boys in a house that was torn apart by the storm. They had no food and little money. They quickly became desperate. The boys grew thin. No one would help them. The other villagers said it was them that had brought the storm. Sébastien ought never to have stayed nor should they have had children. They were to blame and they would suffer the consequences. Besides everyone was suffering. No one had anything to spare.

The woman missed Sébastien badly and fell asleep each night with tears rolling from the corners of her eyes into her hair. Her grief felt like a wave that crashed over her head, rolling her into the ocean floor, washing sand into her eyes, rubbing her raw.

She woke, numb except for her achingly empty stomach, and with three boys that looked to her with fear on their faces and grief on their shoulders. They had not eaten a proper meal in two weeks. That day a man, well turned out in fine clothes, knocked on her broken door and let himself in with a look of distaste. If she hadn’t been weak with hunger the woman would have tossed him from her home.

“I’ve heard tales about a coat you keep hidden away, made from a seal pelt. I don’t want your body or your hands or anything else your little life has to offer. Sell the coat to me and I’ll keep you and your children fed as long as you all live.”

The woman knew then that he had waited until she was starving, until the boys were sick and listless and she was hopeless before making his offer. He knew what Sébastien had been. He knew what the coat was. She felt ill at the idea of seeing him hold it. Her heart could not take it. But their youngest son had cried pitifully that morning because he was so hungry and the sound of his whimpers echoed in her heart too. Sébastien would understand. Sébastien was gone. It didn’t matter anymore.

She nodded her agreement and shook the man’s hand. Slowly she walked to the room, told her boys they would have dinner soon, everything they could eat, and found the key to the locked chest under her side of the bed. Carefully hidden under blankets and old netting. She pulled it out and held it gently. It was soft and warm and it was a sin to sell it. She wanted to wrap it around her shoulders, lay down with its warm shielding her from the world. Instead, she folded it up and never touched it again.

Numbly, the woman handed Sébastien’s coat to the man. His hands fondled the silky thick fur and he smiled in satisfaction. He didn’t even look at her, just waved a hand at his servant and then walked out before she could look at the pelt one last time.

They filled her home with baskets of vegetables, fresh bread, cured meats and bottles of wine. It tasted like ashes and dust. The woman ate steadily. The boys tore into the spread and they all ate until they were sick. That night she slept poorly and dreamt it was Sébastien laid out on the table, and they were tearing flesh off his bones as he begged them to stop. She woke gasping but with strength she had not felt in days. They ate a hearty breakfast. They ate a rich man’s lunch. They feasted for dinner. So it went for days. The food sustained her but offered no nourishment. It was empty. Each forced swallow felt like blades in her throat. She ate a strawberry, her favourite fruit, and it tasted of rank seawater.

Seven days after she sold the skin, there was a noise at the door. The woman looked up from her meal and felt faint. Sébastien stood in the doorway, lit up by the golden light of the dawn. He dripped salt water and was haggard. His broad shoulders were slumped. He held himself up by leaning on the frame. When the woman reached for him and held him again, he felt thin and insubstantial.

“Sébastien, my Sébastien, where have you been? Why did you take so long?” She wept and wept and wept, clutching at his shoulders, frantic and afraid. “Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

“Your brothers fell and I dove overboard to try to reach them. But the waves pulled me under and wouldn’t let me go. The boat was gone when I surfaced so I swam as fast as I could,” Sébastien held her, his voice unfocused and rasping. “It took so long, I thought we must have been washed to the other side of the world.”

“We thought you dead! I thought- I thought-”

“I was afraid you would be gone or lost, that the storm was too fierce. Oh, my love, my love,” he rambled over her words, and then he held her as tightly to his chest as she had wished all those long cold nights and pressed kisses to her face, her ears, her temples, everywhere he could reach. “How did you survive?”

Sébastien had given her his pelt so long ago, a sign of his vow and his love. It was hers to keep, he said. Hers to protect. His heart, his freedom, his home. His soul. She must promise to keep it. And she had promised.

She could not tell him. The woman only said that a kind benefactor had taken pity on the village and offered succour to anyone who was left bereft from the storm. She hoped Sébastien would not ask anyone if that was true, though it would not turn out to matter since not a single soul would speak to him on that subject or any other. So she said nothing. She hoped, desperately, that the foreboding feeling that had curled up inside her stomach was just a child’s fear of fairytales.

Their eldest was the first to be taken. One day he dove too deep, even for them, and became tangled in kelp. He drowned and his young body washed up on the shore. Sébastien found him the next day and carried the small body home, eyes wild and lost, tears rolling down his face.

Their middle child was next. He was walking amongst the tidal rock pools and his foot slipped into a crevice. Stuck by his ankle in the rocks, he could do nothing but watch and cry for help as the tide came in. No one could hear him to help him get free before the waves rose over his head.

The woman grew thin. She took no pleasure in food, no matter what was placed on her dish, and ceased to eat at all. In her delirium she asked Sébastien to save her, she was drowning, why did he leave them, why did he come back, she should never have brought a wild thing home, why didn’t he help her, his love was cursed, they were all cursed. Why did he make her promise to keep him? Sébastien curled up around her on their bed and the salt water of his tears ran down his cheeks and into her hair. He held her tightly and begged for mercy. The woman dreamt of waves crashing, calling, demanding payment with each beat of her foolish heart.

When Sébastien woke during the night he was alone. He stumbled out of the house, calling his love’s name, and finally saw her thin silhouette staggering into the ocean, against the waves, walking deeper and deeper. He ran as fast as his clumsy feet would carry him but long before he could reach her, she was washed beneath one frothing wave and gone forever beneath the roiling water. The pounding of the waves meant no one heard Sébastien screaming her name as he searched frantically for her, nor his wretched cries once he had given up and collapsed onto the sand.

Their youngest, lost in grief and anger, refused to step near the ocean. He lived with his anger, like a festering wound under his skin. He found no love because he was afraid to let anyone close. Angry and alone, he died one night drowning his own blood, tasting salt water, cursing his father’s name and crying for his mother and his brothers. Sébastien sat outside the closed door, head bowed, listening to every word.

After his youngest child breathed his last, the selkie who called himself Sébastien hoped it was done, that the ocean was satisfied with taking all from him in recompense for his refusal to return to it, and knew in his heart it was not. He went to the bedroom he once shared with his beloved and knelt down to pull out the chest from under their marital bed. It was empty and what he suspected was confirmed. He was cursed and, in turn, a curse upon all who loved him.

Nile tugged her lifeboat out to the sheltered break, delayed by having only the strength of her arms, hoping she would not be too late, swearing and barely able to hear her own voice as the wind whipped her words away. How she was going to manage in the wickedly rough currents by herself, she didn’t know. But she would do it. She hadn’t come all this way just to give up now. In the distance, the whistle blew.

Suddenly the boat moved much more briskly and she saw Booker on the other side, pulling with her. He was staring ahead, his expression fixed, and he was saying something to himself. A prayer, perhaps, though he had always scoffed at talk of religion. Nile’s determination glowed at the sight of him and she looked forward again as they dragged the boat in tandem towards and into the ocean.

And though Nicky had said he was afraid of the ocean, Booker didn’t hesitate to stride into the water with her.

“Be careful, Nile,” he yelled, holding the edge once they were deep enough for Nile to jump in. “Please.”

As they pushed out into the sweeping waves and rowed towards the foundering ship, Nile finally recognised what it was she had seen in the turn of Booker’s lips as he whispered quiet words to himself. It was the combination of determination and fear she had seen on soldiers’ faces when they were sent on missions doomed for failure. Then it was too late to do anything but concentrate on pulling the oars, rowing, gasping breaths while waves battered them and tossed them about. Waves rocked their lifeboat and it took no time at all for Nile’s lungs to burn and shoulders to ache as she heaved and rowed and tried to keep eyes upon the fishing boat. It was backbreaking work, made harder by the stinging rain and the bitingly cold winds. But they were making progress. Nile could see Joe and Nicky’s boat ahead of them, nearly to the sailors in need of rescue. She grinned, baring her teeth at the storm and the waves, feeling bolder and bolder.

Then the rogue wave hit.

During Nile’s long ocean journey to Bressay, she had heard the sailors tell tales of rogue waves, sometimes as tall and thick as mountains, appearing out of nowhere as if conjured by magic and striking ships so hard that it rolled them upside down, broke them apart like they made of twigs, and sunk them immediately. They were the spooks of the ocean, and the sailors all had their superstitions about how to ward them off. This one, while not a mountain of water, blindsided the little lifeboat, throwing Nile into the roiling water before she could even take a gasping breath. The impact with the frigid water shocked her as currents swept her under, and then kept her under, rolling her body until she could not be certain which way was up. Nile’s lungs burned with the desire to breathe and salt water choked up her nose. Rough waves broke over her head as she finally surfaced. Spluttering, she managed to keep her head above water and tried to spot Booker or the fisherman or the boat or even Nicky and Joe. But there was nothing. Only rain and the tide and another wave breaking over her head as she fought to stay afloat.

Her clothes became a heavy, constricting weight and her vision spotted with flashes of white. It was astonishing how quickly she weakened in the frigid water and how difficult it became not to just sink below the surface. Each desperate gasp for air was hard fought for and met in turns with accidental mouthfuls of salty water when unexpected waves crashed over her face. Flashes of lightning lit up the sky and Nile heard a crack of thunder and then she was under and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t break free from the current holding her down.

Panic began to overwhelm Nile as the need for oxygen became urgent. But kicking didn’t help, trying to stroke her arms didn’t help. Waves rolled over above her and tossed her about. She was in the deep and she could not tell which way was up. The beating of her pulse became a deafening drumming in her head. She thought briefly of her mother.

All of a sudden, she felt something touching her, gripping her in the grim darkness of the nighttime ocean. Fingers on her shoulder, a hand on her chin, a body pressed against hers. Something – some _one_ – under water next to her. Of all things, a mouth pressed against hers and teased her lips open. Then – a breath. Oxygen. Her lungs filled, to her shocked relief. She breathed out, bubbles rising upwards past her cheeks, and was offered another breath. Nile took it, too desperate to question what was happening. Then she was pulled inexorably upwards until she – _they_ – broke the surface.

Nile heaved as she sucked oxygen in, trying not to choke on salt water, trying to reign in her adrenaline, trying to see just what in the hell was going on. To her shock, it was Booker, frantic as he looked about them. He was holding her up, swimming easily and untroubled by the rough waters as he saw the increasingly distant beacon of the lighthouse. “We must get to shore,” he shouted.

 _No shit_ , Nile thought viciously. Spluttering around a mouthful of water, she saw a long floating plank of wood being washed past them. Debris from one of the wrecked boats, perhaps even their lifeboat. She reached for it, her hand clumsy with cold, and pulled it towards them. It was unwieldy but it would keep them somewhat afloat. Booker saw what she trying to drag towards them and with a look of relief and reached for it as well.

At first they tried positioning themselves with it under their chests equidistant apart, but their size difference quickly made it clear that Booker would sink and Nile would be hoisted partially into the air and toppled off. This initial discovery took more energy than Nile felt she had left to spare as the frigid conditions sapped her strength. They tried again, Booker now closer to the middle and Nile somewhat precariously on one end. It seemed to work and for more than one reason. He swam like the water itself propelled him forward, demonstrating an ease she had never seen within him while on land. When the waves washed over him, he barely seemed to notice. Nile, struggling to hold on and help kick, was certain she would have drowned within minutes without his aid. He never seemed to struggle for breath though his strokes increasingly slowed as time went on and his movements were made sluggish and weary by the unending exertion.

Slowly the coast grew in size. Slowly the tumultuous seas turned into more familial tidal currents. Nile realised the shore they were making for held no familiar landmarks and was not their home. They had been dragged so far by the currents that they were now closer to the coast of Noss, the small isle to Bressay’s east. It was no small relief that they could make it there, seeing as the next place to land was after a long journey across a wide ocean. Soon she did not care. Soon she couldn’t think beyond the effort of kicking and telling herself not to stop, nor to close her eyes, or put her head down upon the frothy pillow of a wave for just a moment to rest.

Finally, they made it to shallow water where they could stand, only to be knocked off their feet by the rolling frothy waves. They staggered gracelessly onto the wet sand out of the shore break and fell to their hands and knees, panting with exhaustion. Nile had never been so relieved to feel wet sand between her fingers. She took heaving breaths, her head bowed and her eyes closed. Her head drooped. She could rest here for a moment, surely. Just for a moment. The haze descended. It took a bolt of lightning, worryingly bright and close followed by a deafening crack of thunder to jolt her back to awareness. 

“Up this way!” Booker said, tossing his head towards the northern end of the shore, tangled locks of hair falling in his face as he pushed himself up and gestured to a distant structure. “We’re on Noss. Currents took us too far from the light to get back that way. But there’s an abandoned shack up the beach. We can shelter there until the storm dies down.”

“What about the others?” Nile turned back to the dark ocean, like there was any chance of her spotting Joe and Nicky. Like she would be able to swim out and rescue them.

“Nicky and Joe?” Booker shrugged wearily. “The ocean may have taken them. If they fell from their boat, the currents have swept them out to deep waters and we may never find their bodies.”

Nile shuddered at the tone of his voice. She could barely feel the icy touch of the wind anymore, nor the wet frigid grip of her soaking clothes on her skin, and when Booker pulled her up by the hand. Nile, freezing cold and numb, watched him stroke across her knuckles and then, still holding her hand, turn and start along the sand, tugging her with him. She staggered next to him, steady footing evading her on the wet sand. It seemed like a mile to walk the beach in the storm, with no sign of respite, only step after aching step, until finally a small structure appeared in the dark. 

Booker shouldered his way into the shack, pushing open the water-swollen door. Inside was little more than a firepit, some stacked wood and blankets. He grabbed one quickly and held it to Nile. She took it, dripping and hazy, her gasps wracking her body.

“Nile, listen to me. You’re ice cold. I’ll light the fire but you need to get out of your wet clothes and wrap up in the blanket.” He held it out and Nile took it slowly. He turned from her then, perhaps to offer some privacy, and knelt to start a fire. Nile watched his broad back for a long moment, mind racing. He must’ve been able to hear her lack of movement, because he snapped, “Quickly, Nile.”

She turned away to find some semblance of privacy and to drag her sopping clothes off. Too clumsy with cold to worry a jot about her nakedness, Nile pulled the blanket over her shoulders and cocooned it around her body. She sat as close to the flickering fire as she could without becoming part of the fire herself.

Booker began pulling his gansey off and his shirt as well, revealing bare chest. Nile averted her eyes. It was, she thought, a comfort not to be wearing wet clothes anymore and to have a blanket and a fire, but she felt no heat from it and it was hard to conceive of ever feeling warmth again. She dared a glance up. In the process of removing his pants. She looked back to the fire and dwelled idly on the unfair nature of the world in general. From the corner of her eye she saw movement of the blanket-wrapping kind and decided, shrouded in a cottony cloud of dangerously low body temperature, that she couldn’t feel her fingers, the fire was going to have a devil of a time warming the poorly constructed shack, and that two blankets were better than one.

“We should,” she said and then coughed to clear the awkwardness from her throat, “we should share. ‘s warmer.”

Booker paused in rubbing at his arms and stamping his feet. “Are… you sure?”

“Of course. It’s fine. It’s silly not to,” Nile said, the words falling out in a staccato rhythm playing the tune of awkwardness. “Wait. Are you sure?”

He answered with a slow nod at first and then, at her insistent stare, said “Yes. You’re right. I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”

To which Nile responded with the best raised eyebrow she could muster under the circumstances. They arranged themselves in the best way to conserve and create body heat. Her back to Booker’s chest, him leaning back against a pile of nets, and Nile reclined against him, blankets wrapped around the pair of them. Objectively, she was aware this was a… compromising position for the two of them to be in. Subjectively she was so cold that she found it hard to care.

When the shivering hit it was impossible to control. It felt like her very bones rattled. The pins and needles that followed turned her teeth from chattering to gritted, as she breathed through the burning pricking that ran in waves over her skin. If Booker suffered the same, she could not tell through her own tremors. But at last the warmth of Booker’s broad body and the fire in front of her permeated the hard shell of frigidity that had encased her. Nile could feel her body slowly relaxing, the tremors easing off, and awareness seeping back into her mind. Most prominently awareness that she was naked, pressed almost entirely against Booker’s chest, sitting between his legs, his arms encasing hers as he held and massaged her hands. Her head was nestled into his neck, and while some sensible part of Nile thought distantly that she ought to shift away, the rest of her couldn’t bear to move at all.

He must have noticed she was coming back to herself. Booker cleared his throat, hesitant, low. “Nile, I’m sorry if I. If I scared you when you were dragged under. I wouldn’t have done such a thing if there was time to bring you back up for air.”

The fire crackled and popped, sending flickering shadows like trailing fingertips over the walls of the shack. Outside the rain fell in heavy drumming beats, interrupted only by the rumbles of thunder. Nile felt her breathing synchronise with Booker’s as she turned the night’s events over in her head. He’d breathed for her, underwater, in the dark depths. She’d been one second from drowning, like – _oh God_ – like Joe and Nicky might have, lost already…

It started as a species of arousal Nile had felt after battles and fights she hadn’t known if she would survive – a rush of adrenaline, an all-encompassing tingling, her skin both burning hot and icy cold. Not precisely sexual in origin, but a hunger all the same for something that would convince her she was still alive. She may have held her hand to the flames or run out into the raging storm to scream at the sky if Booker hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t felt the heat of his skin and the insistent rise and fall of his chest.

She raised one hand, still held by his, and pressed the outside of Booker’s hand to her cheek, to her lips, and felt his intake of breath. His grip tightened and she couldn’t help but turn her face upwards to his, to kiss the underside of his jaw, the hard curve of it, then below where his pulse thudded against her lips. Afraid that saying anything would break the delicate moment. Better not to speak or to think, for fear of letting the thoughts of what happened and the grief of their losses in.

It seemed he held himself back for one moment. A second. And then gave way, like a dam breaking. Nile felt his hand on her chin, resting against her neck, and the sheer size of him made her want and want and want. If she were standing up, she’d have to climb him like a tree, but lying down, she could manoeuvre them both as she wished. The thought of it, of the feast laid out for her, stoked the fire within her, made her ache to feel him. She turned in his lap, pushing the blankets aside, barely willing to move her lips from his, but swinging her legs to straddle him, to hold his face and kiss him again, gasping at the need rising in her, wet and wanting. He groaned and pressed against her and she could feel the heat of him and the desperation growing between them.

The drumming of the rain and the crackle-pop of the fire meant they may have been cajoled into a calmer state, less impulsive and perhaps wiser. But the worst of the storm was overhead and was in no mood to calm anyone. A sudden deafening crack of thunder shattered any peace to be found; the world being lit up by the accompanying lightning made them both gasp in shock, clutch at each other, as though they themselves had been electrified. Booker bit Nile’s lip, Nile scratched her nails down Booker’s chest, and both pressed against each other, urgent and hungry.

Years spent in the army had left Nile with little uncertainty or inexperience in regards to sex. She knew, in some distant thought, that it was foolish to do this. It was a bad idea, with consequences that loomed in the shadows. Booker was a somewhat-functioning alcoholic with an appalling combination of whisky and cynicism coursing through his veins where blood should be. He was older than her mother would ever approve of and a widow and so emotionally repressed sometimes it was a hard job getting him to admit it was a nice day. And he was something she didn’t understand, something uncanny. Perhaps even unnatural. But no less than an hour ago she had almost drowned, so in this moment, she didn’t care, couldn’t wait, wouldn’t settle for anything less than all of him, handsome and ragged and broad and hers. Oh, here he would not run away, here she would have him and keep him.

She could still feel the icy water at the border of their joined lips, how bubbles of air had flickered over her face as she exhaled their precious shared breath from her desperate lungs. Nile took Booker’s cock in her hand, stroked once, twice, just to hear his moans, and then positioned herself above him and sank down. They moaned in chorus; it was too much too fast, and on they raced all the same, neither able to slow the other down. Nile’s head dropping backwards, eyes closed, as she felt the thickness of him inside her, his hands gripping her tight, clenching and releasing as she rocked against him.

They moved together, his hands on her hips, one dragging across her thigh and moving to press against where their bodies met. Nile rocked and ground against him, lost in the aching pleasure that was rising within her. He moved his thumb against her, in time with her rise and fall, until all she could do was grind against him, leaning down to bite his lip, kiss him again, and then sit up and arch her back, rough breathes exhaled like low sobs. The ache of him inside her was unbearable and she wanted more of it, wanted all of him. She came in a hungry wave of feeling, sharp like a blade.

Booker’s chest heaved in shuddering breaths, his hips stirred into tiny movements, like he was doing his best to stay still and yet could not entirely restrain himself. His face was wild with it, sex-drunk eyes and swollen lips, his wet tangled hair a mess. It was breath-taking. Nile ran her hands down his chest, across the scratch marks she had left, across his nipples and upwards again, pressing against his shoulders and groaning as he moved within in her and then stilled himself again.

“Don’t stop,” Nile looked at him as she said it, ordered it and saw how his eyes widened and his breath stuttered. She ached with wanting, with a rising need to keep this moment unbroken, to keep him here, like this, just hers and hers alone. She moved against him again and watched him groan and turn his face upwards, away from hers. She reached then for him, cupping his cheek before moving to take a handful of his hair and tug so that he was held tight in her hand.

“Please,” he gasped. “Nile, please.”

“Look at me,” she said, needing his attention focused and on her, saying her name roughly. Booker, desperate, met her stare and groaned again when she tightened her grip on his hair. He leaned upwards and dragged his lips against hers, rough and ragged with stubble, even while his tongue flicked against hers in raw sensation.

When he came, she felt it in the rumble of his chest, the stuttering of his hips, the clenched grip of his hands on her hips. She felt it against her lips as he gasped her name again and again, and she rode out her second climax with the taste of her name on his tongue. Tremors rocked her as she let the aftershocks wash over her, the tingles of adrenaline and lust goose-pimpling her skin. She wanted more, to keep this moment frozen in amber, to press Booker’s hands over his head, make him keep them there while she rode him again, to spend long hours touching his body to see how he reacted, take him in her mouth, and hold his head between her thighs, find out all the rough deep sounds he would make.

Exhaustion won out.

Nile collapsed down on his chest, laying beside him, leg tossed over his. She ought to clean herself, ought to wash, ought to stoke the fire and dress herself. Instead, Nile pressed her ear against Booker’s chest and closed her eyes, falling asleep messy and utterly exhausted as she listened to the unsteady beating of his heart and felt his hand sweeping uncertainly across her back.

Her sleep, restless and light, was filled with strange dreams of low tides and angry winds, a deep-seated certainty that she was on an unstable precipice and, in the distance, the lighthouse was crumbling into the sea.

It was to the smell of roasting fish and the sound of steady rain and quieter sets of waves that Nile woke. She was alone under the blankets. The low morning light was seeping in through the gap under the door, though the sun wasn’t yet up. Booker was dressed and tending to the fire, which crackled and popped its heat out into the shack. He had fish skewered and cooking. He greeted her softly and pointed to her clothes, dried and folded neatly next to her.

The exhaustion that had smothered Nile the night before, seemed to have settled over Booker’s nape. His eyelids were heavy, his shoulders slumped, and his eyes glazed. It was apparent he hadn’t slept at all.

Nile dressed. It was a strange thing, how any potential awkwardness from their liaison was overwhelmed by the dark depths of every other unlikely thing that had happened the night before. She went outside to relieve herself and wash as best she could in the foamy dregs of ocean water that were left in puddles from the low tide. In the dim light, storm debris littered the beach. Nile almost trod on the limp feathery mass of a bird. She side-stepped at the last second and looked down at it, overcome for a moment. The poor dead thing. A puffin. There was no mercy in a storm, not from the sky nor the sea, not for anything. Not so different from the battlefields she had left behind. She looked up and down the beach then. Would she find Joe or Nicky left limp on the shore also?

But there was nothing to see.

She returned to the shack and took the plate from Booker’s offered hand. The fire made for a half-hearted distraction, enough to sit beside and stare into.

“Do- do you really think they’re dead?” Nile finally said. She picked at the fish, pulling tender white flakes off the bone and eating them. It was a strange sensation, to be desperately hungry and yet hold no desire for food.

When he answered, Booker’s voice was a carefully steady tone. It was the very evenness of it that revealed his turmoil, held below a calm surface. “Yes. And Andy, if she ventured out to rescue them. The storm likely took them all. After-”

He cut himself off.

“After you fell asleep, I searched for them. But there’s no sign. Not above or below.”

Nile watched the flames flicker and the shadows dance on the wall. They cast strange lights, dancing and taunting in the haze of the early morning. She felt the lingering ache between her thighs, the need that had gripped her, the desire to hold Booker down and to _keep_ him, and she was afraid of the strength of it. Her mother used to tell her stories, fairytales with often unhappy endings, and had warned her that the world was bigger than she knew, and filled with strange and curious things. She did not have it in her to tiptoe around the topic. So she poked the fire with a stick and asked, “What _are_ you?”

There was a heavy silence. Booker sat on the opposite side of the fire. He patted his pocket, seemingly without noticing, looking for his flask, and then realised what he was doing and stopped. “Have you ever heard of the seal folk?” At Nile’s slow nod, he continued: “On the Shetlands, they call them… they call _us_ selkies.”

It was easy to mock the superstitions of sailors and fishing villages. Interesting stories that grew from tired eyes and desperate souls. Until Nile had lived alongside the ocean, had seen its moods and mysteries, had been beguiled by its beauty and held ransom to its power, she might have scoffed. But no more than a few hours ago, Nile had been on the verge of drowning and Booker had breathed for her as the deep ocean currents swept them below the surface. So she nodded slowly. “You can become a seal?”

“No. Yes. In a way,” He was either unwilling or unable to explain in detail. “I’ve – I have lost – my coat was taken from me.”

“But you aren’t being… kept at the lighthouse?”

Booker shook his head. “It’s more complicated. It began a long time ago when I met my wife.”

He poked the fire and kept his eyes low, turned down and focused on the glowing embers. Nile wasn’t sure she wanted him to keep going, but it seemed the floodgates were open. And Booker spoke with an wry twist resting on his face, though his eyes were as sad as she had ever seen them.

“We’re meant to stay on land for a day or two, a week at most. And then we must return to the sea. But I loved her and I wanted to remain with her. I made her promise to keep me. I could not have stayed otherwise. But I didn’t tell her… the danger of it. I thought I could outwit it. I shouldn’t have made her swear the oaths. Everything that came after was because of me. I stayed too long even when my own blood burned for me to go back. I would dream of the water and then wake and stroke her beautiful curls, stroke the boys’ soft cheeks. How would they live without me? They would think I had abandoned them, that my love was weak. Perhaps it was.

“I stayed too long. There was a storm and believing me dead, my wife sold my coat to feed our children. She broke her oath, though she had not known what she was truly swearing. She was punished for it.

“My sons died alone. My wife died alone. In pain. Crying and afraid. I could do nothing. This is my punishment. Until I regain my coat, I am cursed. Never to return home, never to age.”

“Can you not find it?” Nile, buffeted about by the shock of the past few days, still couldn’t help but search out solutions. _Here is your problem, how can we solve it?_

“You think I haven’t tried?” Booker threw a small stick into the fire. “The family she sold it to have held claim to it for three generations. It was they who bought it all those years ago.”

“So, as long as they have it, you’ll live forever?”

“Live?” Booker shook his head once. “No. But I won’t die. I can’t return to the ocean. I live half a life. Cursed to walk the earth that I refused to leave, cursed to be the death of everyone I love.”

He stared grimly into the fire. Nile took the moment to contemplate her situation, her choices, and her life leading up to this point. She had heard some dramatic statements in her time. Things like ‘Walk tall into battle, soldiers, for Eternal Glory awaits!’ and ‘’We’re all going to Hell today!” But Booker’s pronunciation took the biscuit.

Finally, she settled with familiar common sense. “Can you steal it back?”

Booker, looking taken aback, said, “What?”

“The… skin. Your coat. If they won’t give it to you, can you steal it back?”

“You don’t know how the story usually goes then. Humans who get their hands on a selkie skin hide them away, keep our coats and our freedom.” Booker laughed, though nothing was funny. “The son who has it now won’t give it up. He has no use for it but he’ll keep it just so no one else can have it. Especially not me.”

“Does he want you for a husband?” Nile asked uncertainly.

“No.” Booker seemed disinclined to add anything further, and they could suddenly hear a voice calling from outside, but as Nile stood to investigate the noise, she thought she heard him murmur, “He wants a trade.”

But then the door crashed in, knocked off its hinges, and the inimitable silhouette of Andy stood in the doorway. 

“Were you planning to sleep in all morning?”

Nile ran to her, hugged her, mind falling into relief with a heavy thud. She hadn’t realised how tautly she’d been holding herself, how much she had needed to see Andy, the bulwark they all relied upon.

“It’s good to see you,” Andy said in her ear before letting her go and offering a small grin. “You had us worried.”

Booker walked over, relief slipping over his features. He reached out a hand for Andy to shake and she took it, squeezed, then grinned as she pulled him in for a hug. He cupped the back of her head, held her tight, and though she was laughing, he was blinking quickly, eyes flicking as though they could not settle.

Finally he drew back: “What of…”

“Joe and Nicky are fine. Very worried about you two. Soaked to the bone and determined to continue searching for you. But this morning we saw the smoke from your fire and I knew I’d find you here.” Andy claps Nile on the back. “I knew you’d have it under control.”

Nile asked, “And the sailors?”

“The others picked up the sailors who were still alive on the boat, four souls, and were making their way back to shore when they saw your boat flipped and sinking. They couldn’t find either of you and had to row in to drop the others off. They tried to look for you, but by then the storm was so strong they could barely get the boat more’n a hundred feet from the shore and you were long gone.”

Booker heaved a sigh of relief and finally the night’s events seemed to hit him like a sack of bricks. He listed to one side, reaching for the shack’s doorframe to keep him standing. Andy took him by one arm, Nile by the other, and they staggered down to the lifeboat Andy had rowed over to find them. Even then, once pushed over the side and floundering to a seat, he took one oar with every intention of rowing them in a circle to get them home.

Andy and Nile exchanged communicative looks and Andy said, “Booker, you look like you’re about to drop. Give Nile the oar and lie down before I make you.”

For a brief moment, he looked stubbornly at Andy. She simply stared back and the stalemate ended predictably when it came to Andy’s orders; Booker huffed and handed over the oar. He shuffled off the seat and to the floor at one compact end of the boat. How a large man squeezed himself into that space was a mystery, even moreso that he seemed content with the position he chose. He threw an arm over his face and curled into a neck-breaking ball. It looked incredibly uncomfortable in conjunction with the unsteady rocking of the boat, neither of which bothered him none. It was times like these that Nile questioned her judgement when it came to matters of attraction.

Once he was settled, Andy and Nile took up their oars and began the journey home.

It was probably the calm ocean or the soothing rhythm of the oars, but Nile felt the last forty-eight hours slam into her mind. Andy and Nicky and Joe had died in her thoughts over and over again, thanks to Booker’s dire predictions, lost at sea while she could do nothing. Booker and she had slept together. Booker was – was – was…

Andy must’ve felt her rising panic, the latent fear that gripped her by the throat, squeezed her lungs despite her attempts to wrangle it under control. It was with a carefully casual voice that Andy began speaking.

“I never told you why I chose to become the Bressay light’s principle keeper, did I?”

Nile shook her head, feeling the salt stickiness of her braids, tangles catching unpleasantly. They’d need redoing, she thought, the mundane task a reassuring reminder of normal life.

“Before they built the lighthouse, everyone said it was too dangerous and that any ship that sailed this way had to be mad. But they built it anyway. I suppose that’s where I wanted to be. Somewhere I could look at the ocean, where only the reckless would dare sail. Where I could be as near Quynh as I could.”

Nile did some quick mental arithmetic. The lighthouse had been there since 1858. If Andy had been there from the beginning, she was remarkably well-preserved for her years. It was… possible, Nile thought. But unlikely.

“Quyhn?” Her mouth asked without input from her mind.

Andy continued, speaking to the ocean and the sky, as though she was telling her story to the natural world and Nile happened to be there listening.

“You’d call us fae or fairy or the fair folk. We visited often from our lands. It was an adventure, I suppose. Sometimes we were called upon for succour. They’d lay out offerings and sacrifices. This time, this time we heard the calls of the women they tortured and burned or hanged or drowned, in the name of piety in the face of witchcraft. We felt their pain and suffering, and the hatred of the mob coiled around them all. Their suffering was like rank smoke rising in from a fire. So we came to put a stop to it.”

Every stroke and pull. The droplets of cold water. The windburn on Nile’s nose and her chapped lips. It was all so ordinary, and yet everything was made newly strange. Each wave smacking against their little boat was a jolting shock.

“It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the witchfinders had their _clever_ means of catching us,” Andy spat the word out. “We were betrayed and captured, bound down with iron. Then they took her. They put Quyhn in an iron cage, sailed beyond the horizon and cast her into the ocean, where I couldn’t see her. They took her from me. I promised her she’d be safe, that we wouldn’t be parted – that I’d save her.”

Nile dared a glance at Andy. Her profile was like stone. “I was freed by one of the women we saved. The bravery it took for her to come back to that miserable place. Once I was released from the iron prison, I searched for Quynh. I took every living soul on that ship and tore them apart. I walked the dreams of every witchfinder. I tormented the wretch Witchfinder General Hopkins, until the moment of his death. But I could find no answer. Not even a clue. She was just… gone. Quynh’s out there still, beyond my reach.”

She must’ve given something away in her expression or flicked a subconscious glance towards Booker’s prone form lying at the bottom of the boat. Asleep or not, he didn’t move.

“Did you think selkies were the only mystery this world holds? It’s bigger than him and his people, or you and yours. Anyway. I promise the ocean won’t be the death of me, whatever Book tells you.” Andy rowed steadily. Maybe it helped that she could avoid looking at anything but the horizon. “I lost Quynh. I’m not going to let anything happen to my crew. Not to the others and not to you. Not again.”

The oars slipped into the water and pulled them closer and closer to the lighthouse. Nile timed her breathing with each stroke. It helped to keep her mind off her tired and sore shoulders. It also helped to keep her overwhelmed mind under control. Selkies and fae, iron cages and lost seal skins. Did Booker know? Nile suspected not, nor Joe or Nicky. They would have said something, however inadvertently.

Andy, strength unceasing, kept her eyes forward and her strokes smooth. “It’s a lot to take in, kid. If you want to ask anything, ask, but to tell you the truth, I prefer to let it be.”

They rowed silently from then on, all the way to their landing beach. Andy and Nile got out into the shallow water and Andy shook Booker by his shoulder, saying roughly, “Wake up, asshole.”

He moved his arm and looked up at her, at them both.

“We’re home,” Nile explained. He nodded dazedly and took Andy’s hand to help him to the sand.

After they tugged the boat ashore, Booker lingered at the shore. Nile turned to him in question and he just said, “Go on in. I’ll be there shortly.”

When she glanced back, she saw Booker kneeling in the shallow waters, hands thrust into the wet sand, his body turned to the ocean, head bent in a kind of supplication. She shut the door behind her.

Nicky and Joe swept Nile into their arms, laughter and tears combined in terrible joy.

Booker finally came in, having gathered his composure. He exchanged hugs and back slaps with the others, laughed off their concerns, accepted a pitcher of water and swatted away the tears that occasionally fell down his face.

Life returned to something resembling normal after that day. Tasks and duties at the lighthouse did not stop just because a storm had upended their hearts. If anything, they had more to do. The windows needed to be scrubbed clean, all the clockwork required close inspection, and the weather station was in deep need of repair. The tides continued coming in and going out and the log book had to be kept.

They laid out four wreaths for the men lost. Nile stood watch over the changing tide. Nicky and Joe prayed for them in their particular ways. Booker poured out his flask of whisky for them, though no doubt it was refilled shortly thereafter. Andy stood back from them all, watching stoically. And it was done.

Nile found, oddly, that after the storm, the tension with Booker had drifted from awkward to something closer to waiting. Curiosity made her gaze fall upon him without her meaning to, watching now to see if he ever gave any sign of his strangeness, but he was the same man he had always been. They weren’t scheduled for a watch together for a few nights so she was content to work alongside him sometimes, have the occasional shared meal with him and the others, and settle back into the regular routines. Odd, that it seemed more normal now that she had been told Booker and Andy’s secrets. Even odder that their liaison hadn’t curdled their friendship.

In fact, even Booker seemed even less inclined to his usual moroseness. Instead his mood flickered from warmth to a tension she could not resolve, one directed inwards. His flask remained a constant companion, though she did not actually see him drink from it. He swung from nervous energy to stillness to almost a kind of neediness, wanting to be near them all while standing apart from them, close enough to touch if he wanted to, just far enough to hold himself away. They all noticed his new behaviour, exchanging amused glances when Booker wasn’t looking, and put it down to after-effects of their experience during the storm. Nile could understand that. Nile herself had begun to keep tabs on them all, feeling most secure when she knew where each crewmember was.

It was hard to quantify how she felt about Booker. Friendship, certainly. Lust? Well, when he’d lifted the edge of his shirt to wipe his face, revealing the bare, sweating skin of his hips and she had watched in the hope of seeing more, she’d tipped backwards off her chair while Joe laughed uproariously. Love… she couldn’t say. Perhaps she just wouldn’t say. She picked at the idea, worrying over it like a lion with a thorn in its paw. It seemed a dangerous thing to invest her heart in him – a seductive gamble despite, or perhaps because of, its terrible odds. She was frequently afraid it was a gamble she had already lost.

During their first shared watch Booker asked for stationery from Nile to write a letter. He’d never shown any interest in writing before nor was Nile aware that he even _knew_ anyone outside of the crew enough to write to. Unusual, certainly, but Nile didn’t want to pry. So, with steaming mugs of tea between them, they sat together and the scratching sound of epistolary endeavours filled the watch room. Nile smiled as she pondered her correspondence, how to share her happiness and her griefs, the events of the storm and the depth of her feelings for Booker. Perhaps it was wiser to leave that out.

_My dearest brother,_

_Forgive me for not writing in so long. It has been an eventful time here on Bressay, so much so that I don’t rightly know how to share it all._

_We suffered a vicious storm. Five souls were lost at sea. It was a difficult time and I hope not to see its like again any time soon. I will not burden you with the details; suffice it to say that the North Sea shows little mercy to those who sail her seas. It is a small relief that I have now experienced the worst this life offers. I feel as though I have become a true, blooded member of the crew. Please tell our mother that she needn’t worry. I am well cared for here._

_Are your studies going well? Tell me about them and don’t skimp on the details. What news from the front? Perhaps the war is finally over and no one has bothered to tell us. The one aspect of life here that is difficult to adjust to is that we are so far removed from the rest of the world. Most of the time it is a relief to be at the end of the earth, though I wonder what is happening beyond our shores. News arrives here so slowly, if it does at all. It’s a strange feeling. I haven’t left our little island in months. Please write soon and remind me that the wider world still exists._

_I hope you are all well._

_All of my love,_

_Your sister,_

_Nile_

Once Nile had finished her letter, Booker offered to take them both with him to the mainland, joining Andy on her trip over. The letters sat together on the bench until he left the next morning.

Nile, like any clever soldier, had perfected the art of writing someone’s messy handwriting upside down. Oftentimes it was the only way to find out what her officers were planning, as she stood before their camp desks and listened with one ear to their orders. It had been a reflexive action for her to glance down upon the mail left on the bench as Booker prepared his satchel for the trip. Booker’s letter, while sealed, was in an envelope addressed to a person in London she did not recognise: _Mr James Copley._

And the days carried onwards.

It was while Nile was cleaning the dishes that Nicky came huffing into the kitchen, throwing his arms in the air. “He’s going to die and I’m going to kill him.”

Andy followed, laughing and fetching a long, sturdy rope. “They’ve finally tried to scale the bluff from the base and Joe is stuck.”

“They’ve been talking about attempting it ever since Booker washed up here. I don’t know _why_ they thought now was the time to break their necks, but I regret–” Nicky turned his head to sky and said to the uncaring clouds, “I _regret_ their idiot heads and my own idiot heart for caring.”

Nile shook her head and followed Andy back out the door to the bluff’s peak, where one figure was lying sprawled at the edge. She recognised Booker’s broad shoulders, outstretched as they were off the side of the precipice. Nile hurried to him and saw he was talking to Joe, maintaining a veneer of calm while Joe cursed down below.

Nile peered carefully over the edge. And there was Joe, clinging to the side of a small outcrop like a panicked limpet. Booker seemingly had been planning to follow him up, though had now thought better of it and was now bickering with him from above, the effort at calming Joe devolving into a game of apportioning the blame as to who had prompted who to try climbing the cliff. The retrieval went smoothly, once Joe managed to loop the rope around his waist. Nicky and Booker tugged him up the side of the cliff while Nile and Andy kept watch and tried not let Joe hear their laughter at his cursing every time he bounced off and back onto the ragged surface or scraped against a sharp outcrop. 

Once safely back on dry land, Joe and Booker spent the afternoon trying to win Nicky’s forgiveness. It was Booker who managed it, though Nile didn’t find out how until some days later.

All was revealed on one of those blessed days where the wind was little more than a breeze, the winter sun shone and filled the island with unseasonal warmth, and there was a lightness to the very air itself. Nile came into the kitchen after spending a shoulder-aching pair of hours scrubbing down the salt crust off the rails and was met with a delicious smell. Her stomach grumbled audibly and she peered into the unattended pot on the stove top. Then she looked around. 

“Ah ah ah, not yet, not yet,” Nicky came in, scolding her as she just started to dip a finger into the richly coloured stew filled with mussels and crab and fish. “It must cook down a little longer. When the bread is done, we can eat.”

“What is it?”

“It’s bouillabaisse,” Nicky rolled the word together. “It’s a type of fish stew from Booker’s home. Very delicious, very hearty. He showed me his wife’s recipe and we matched it as closely as we could. No _rascassse_ , unfortunately, but we managed the conger and gurnard fish, and added some local crab, mussels, and coalfish to make our own Bressay bouillabaisse. A success, I think.”

Nile took a seat at the table and watched Nicky cut up potatoes and put them on to boil, before he began combining oil and garlic and egg yolk and a spice together into a thick mayonnaise-looking spread he said was called _rouille_. He took out the bread and sliced it into thick slices, interred the potatoes in the stew, and then looked over all his preparations.

“I think,” he tasted the stew and nodded, “I think it’s almost ready to serve. Nile, could you call the others in?”

It wasn’t difficult. Nile suspected the others had been lured in by the scents drifting out from the kitchen and had found jobs to do that kept them within earshot. And there was something wonderfully satisfying about seeing each of them come in to find the spread Nicky had laid out upon the table. Delight lit up their eyes as they took in the vibrant colour of the stew and they each filled their bowls to the brim, happy sighs filling the room as they all began to eat.

“It’s wonderful,” Nile said earnestly and was rewarded with an eye-crinkling smile from Booker. It was a meal for a family, she thought. It was meant to be shared. For a moment she could feel her mother and brother there handing out plates, her young cousins running around, her aunts and uncles joking behind her, even her father watching them all in satisfaction.

“It’s been… a long time since I’ve tasted _bolhabaissa_.” Booker held a slice of the toast, slathered in the _rouille_ , and breathed in the rich garlic scent. “Many years without saffron.”

“Who knew you had a taste for the luxurious?” Joe had a good point – Booker had on more than one occasion eaten dry bread rather than bother to make himself anything more complicated.

“Ah, you think because it is rich and delicious that it is a luxury? No, _non_ , for us, this is what you made from what no one would buy from your catch. The bony fish, the rock dwellers, the leftovers. None of the fish have good flavour on their own, you see. And the stew is made from the cheapest vegetables. But with the right spices, you can make them sing.” Booker held his glass up to Nicky. “And the right _chef_. Nicky is the only person outside Marseille I’d trust to do it justice.”

Nicky returned his toast, a pleased grace lighting up his eyes.

They all ate large serves of seconds though Andy put everyone to shame when she went back for a third helping. In the years to come, Nile would dream about the mouth-watering taste of the broth, the succulent white meat of the fish and crab, the flavour soaked up by the fresh mussels, and the warmth of the bread with its thick coating of the rich _rouille_. But Nicky would not be brought to make it again.

They sat on second watch together. It was quiet at first, much like the very first time they were alone together. This time, however, the silence was far more relaxed, the night a dark shawl wrapped snugly over the island, and the moon a thin crescent in the sky above. Nile noted a ship’s passage in the log book.

Finally, Booker put the enamel mug he had cupped between his hands down and cleared his throat a little. Nile looked at him and waited for him to say whatever it was he was considering saying.

“Would you like to come see the seal colony with me tomorrow?” 

Pleased and surprised, Nile tried to keep from showing it too much on her face. But she felt the corner of her mouth lifting anyway.

“Is it time to introduce me to the family?”

Booker coughed and spluttered on his tea as he laughed, taken by surprise.

“Not quite so private as my people, I think,” He said wryly. “But we’ll keep our distance from these ones, all the same.”

The following morning, after a late breakfast, they set off along the coastal cliffs. The sun hid occasionally behind swiftly passing clouds and the wind had its seasonal bite, but Nile thought it invigorating. Their hands brushed against each other as they walked. Not since she had walked the promenade of her youth had she been so restrained – the army had been no place for gentle manners. Nile found she enjoyed the coy flirtation. Booker pointed out the remains of a Viking settlement he thought Nile would find particularly interesting. A brush. On the hill stood two stout little ponies, facing away from the wind. Another brush.

Finally, Nile took Booker’s rough hand in hers, squeezed it gently and threaded her calloused fingers between his. Booker tried to look gruff and landed instead on pleased.

The walk passed quickly, though Nile would have happily lapped the island just to keep hold of the joy of walking hand in hand. Booker led Nile to a rise looking out over the shore, close enough they could watch the seals, not so close that they were likely to disturb them.

The seals below lay on the sand and against the rocks, sunning themselves, calling out occasionally in rough barks. They manoeuvred themselves about in awkward flops. Nile wished she could see their eyes, the fine points of their whiskers, and the ridges of their flippers. She wished she could understand how Booker could become such a creature.

“Is it difficult to look at them?” She asked cautiously. It was such a precarious topic to broach, wrapped as it was in his family and his stolen coat and even her own wariness.

“I’ve been,” He replied, “little tempted to come here. It’s both too little and too much like seeing what I have lost. But I thought you might like to. It’s as close as is possible, I suppose.”

They sat there and watched the colony for a time, the silence a little more delicate, a little more wistful. The seals on land were graceless, encumbered and slow. But in the water they dove and swum, nimble and quick through the waves. Nile wondered if Booker felt clumsy trapped in his body, though she did not want to ask and chance hurting him with the reminder. 

Finally, one let out a truly raucous shout. They both laughed at the unexpected noise and then looked at each other to exchange grins. From there, Nile could not have said who leaned towards who or who first raised a hand to touch the other’s face. But within moments they were kissing. There, with the winter sunlight shining on them, the breeze ruffling their clothes, and the briny salt spray of the ocean on their skin. No fainting damsel from a serial, Nile nonetheless felt ravished by the moment, devoured by the need rising like a tide within her.

Perhaps they ravaged each other, stealing all they could, or taking and giving in turns. Booker certainly looked pillaged when he drew back, face hazy with desire as he worked his way down her body, pressing kisses to her breasts and navel over the material of her shirt.

“Can I-?” He looked up at Nile from between her legs, bottom lip bitten and swollen, eyes hungry, hands drifting and squeezing on her thighs.

Nile nodded, trying to keep her voice even as she said, “At your leisure.”

Booker heaved a desperate breath and closed his eyes for a moment before reaching for the buttons of her trousers. She lifted her hips enough that he could pull them down over her ankles, then broke into throaty, enraptured laughter when he lifted her legs, resting one on each shoulder and his head between her thighs. It was deliciously scandalous to be so exposed out in the open, under the vast sky where anyone could see. Only no one would see, no one was near, they may as well be all alone in the world. Nile didn’t bother to hold back any noises when Booker brought his mouth down upon her, sucking and licking until she was a wet and aching being, a body made of sensations, thighs tightening around him as he teased a finger along her entrance. When he pushed it into her, she grabbed at his other clever, clever hand that was squeezing her thigh. At last she was coming, her hand holding the back of his head, gasping as he urged her on and on until finally she pushed him away.

After she regained her breath and some semblance of composure, she tugged at him from where his head rested upon her thigh, urged him to sit up and lean his back against her so she could wrap her body around his, hold her hand to his wet lips, have him lathe it with his tongue, and then take him in her hand and wring the pleasure from him. She savoured his gasps and bit at his jaw as he writhed against her, all his bulk wound tight with need, driving him upwards and upwards and then holding him tightly on the precipice until at last she let him tip over the edge, wet and wanting over her hand. He did so with a shout he could not contain and Nile wondered if the seals below were as amused by their noises.

When they got back, sunburned and tired, smiling and warm, it was Andy who met them upon their return. Her toolbelt was draped over her shoulder, grease covered her hands and was smeared across her face, and her disposition was that of someone who had just completed a satisfying mechanical task. Nile smiled at seeing it – though truthfully, she was smiling at everything at the moment.

“Nice to see you’ve enjoyed your afternoon off while I hacked my fingers to the bone fixing that gearing breakage,” Andy teased on her way past into the cottage. “At least you’ve made it back for first shift. Oh, and Book? There’s a letter from a Mr Copley for you. I left it in the watch room.”

It seemed that Booker’s face froze or fell, but the moment passed so quickly that Nile assumed she had imagined it. She was then distracted by Booker pressing a gentle kiss to her cheek before he walked to the lighthouse to begin his watch. Nile was met in the kitchen by all three faces doing their best to appear as though they hadn’t seen a thing, and yet clearly demonstrating they were thoroughly amused at the goings on.

“You’re all children,” she rolled her eyes, not bothering to disguise her own smile. Andy laughed then, her head reared back, guttural and sincere. Nicky smiled a gentle smile. It was Joe who stood up and hugged her in delight.

“I’m glad you decided to come here, Nile. I think you were meant to come here. And not just because you’re good for the big lump. You seem happier too. Happier here with us.” Joe squeezed her again before letting her go. “Thank you for being patient with him.”

They were all very quick to believe in happiness. Even Andy held out a flicker of hope in her despair. Later, she would question what it was she missed, how the lightness had settled upon all of them as though shadows and lies did not exist. She ought to have known better than anyone that the fickle ocean was as likely to destroy as it was to bless, regardless of how well you loved it, and the creatures that called it home were no different. As though she had not already learned a hundred times over that the payment for joy was grief. And it was a debt that demanded to be paid.

It was a refreshing morning in late February. Joe and Nicky had gone out for what they called a refreshing walk and what everyone else called a display of public indecency. Booker was on an errand to one of the farmers on the other side of the island, picking up a stock of eggs. Andy was recording measurements at the weather station. And Nile was at the kitchen table, methodically working on putting the dewcell back together after a thorough cleaning. It took no small amount of concentration and she had only just felt confident on remembering how all the fittings worked and could be puzzled back together. She was holding a rather delicate piece so when Booker came crashing through the door, and it took all her composure not to throw it in the air or crush it in her clenched fist.

“Damn it all to Hell, Booker!” She exclaimed in surprise.

“Where’s Andy?” He demanded, ignoring her ruffled feathers. “Andy!”

“What’s happened,” Nile stood quickly, though Booker ignored her and raced through the cottage and out the rear door, to the weather station. Nile followed and found Booker huffing at Andy’s shoulder.

“Nicky and Joe have been taken. Arrested. The Laird’s back and said he found them poaching and was going to have them sent the mainland and locked up for hunting on his land!”

“Hunting?” Andy was taken aback. “Hunting _what_ , exactly?!”

She raised a good point. No one was exactly chomping at the bit to hunt for game on Bressay.

“His man didn’t say. But he wouldn’t listen to me, he’ll need to hear from the principle keeper to stop this from ending with the pair of them in chains, shipped off to the mainland.”

“Lord above,” Andy swore and brushed her hands off on her pants. “I’ll handle this. Booker, you’re with me, you know where they are.”

Andy gathered her tools together and handed the kit to Nile. “Nile, stay here. Watch over the cottage and light, mind your duties, and if by some rotten chance we aren’t back by nightfall, you’ll need to stay on through the watches. Can you handle it?”

Nile looked back and forth from Andy to Booker, Booker to Andy. She nodded. “Yes.”

Andy clasped her shoulder and her gaze. “Kid, you’ve got this. We’ll be back soon.”

Then Andy and Booker strode away across the headland, him without so much as a reassuring comment or a glance backwards. Nile watched them disappear down the path. She watched for longer than that. Then she turned and walked back to the cottage, stowed away the toolkit, and stood in the kitchen door, making lists of what she would need to do. She packed away the dewcell’s pieces. She walked up the lighthouse steps and checked the fuel levels, the lens, the windows, and the log book.

She looked over the charter of laws. There was nothing in them about poaching. Nor could she find anything in the log book. She’d never heard a single story about Joe and Nicky hunting anything on the island. Or anyone else, for that matter.

Nile could not help the heavy put in her stomach from leeching out into her limbs, nor the worrying suspicion in her heart from taking root and growing lush in her mind.

By mid-afternoon, when no-one had returned, Nile made her decision. Something was not right. They ought to have returned. It wasn’t against the law, whether it made the local nobility happy or not. Which meant Andy wouldn’t stand for it. Which meant she would have dragged Nicky and Joe out and home by now. Nile paced the walkway from the cottage to the lighthouse several times before she made up her mind. She could make it to the manor and back again before nightfall. She’d just… check on them.

It was only when she was putting on her coat to leave that Nile hesitated in thought. Then she took the sharpest blade from the kitchen, the heaviest hammer from the tool box, and tucked both into her belt. Satisfied, she left the cottage and strode towards the other side of the island.

The manor loomed up out of the rolling hills. It was strange, Nile thought, to be so fond of an island, to feel so at home and safe inside its cliffs and beaches, and yet all the while an asp had nestled into its bosom. She gave enough time towards watching the manor from a distance to reassure herself that it was unlikely she’d be stopped from entering. There hardly seemed anyone about at all. But she couldn’t wait long, not with her mind filled with terrible visions of the team being held inside. So she made her way to the staff entrance at the rear.

Inside the manor was eerily quiet. The rooms were filled with paintings and tapestries, expensive furniture and exquisite carvings – all of it beautiful and none of it loved. The manor could have housed a family of dozens and it was empty and cold and lifeless. Nile hated houses like this. Their little keeper’s cottage took up less space than half the ground floor and contained more love and laughter than the manor had ever seen since it was built.

She found a staff member, a young girl working in the kitchen, and took her by the arm. The girl, wide-eyed and worried, was quick to share that the Laird’s men had taken the wickies down to the cellar. She was only there because the Laird had sent for someone to make his meals. She wanted to go home. She wasn’t going down there, she said, not for all the gold in the world. But she would show Nile where the entrance was.

Down the stairs was where Nile found them.

There was one cell, more a cage than anything else. It held all four of them, shackled and chained. Joe was yelling at Booker, vicious and upset. Blood dripped down one side of his face and one eye was swollen shut. Nicky tried to calm him, speaking through a split and bloody lip, but the task was made difficult by the ire and grief wreathed around them all. Andy was staring at the ceiling, her expression a picture of loss and defeat. And around the shackles on her ankles and wrists were wretched burns, raw and bubbling.

Booker, hunched and sagging, sat apart from them. He had never looked so small or listless. Though even in this state, his observant gaze caught her entrance.

“Nile?”

“What happened?” Nile stared in at them. She tried without much hope to open the cell door and found it locked.

“I told him. I told Merrick about Andy so he’d return my coat to me. He wants eternal youth. I told him she was fae and therefore could grant it. I heard what she said to you in the boat. I told him to use iron.” Booker stared at his hands and his voice was dreadful in its emptiness. “And when he had her, I reminded him of our deal. He laughed.”

Nile took that awful confession in, felt her heart become a stone within the cage of her chest, and elected to focus instead on the problem in front of her. She examined the lock. As Booker said, it was heavy iron, as were the bars. She’d need a team of horses to pull it down. And forget breaking through it. She turned to the hinges.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Nicky asked. “We would have helped you.”

Behind her, a guard came through the open cell door. He wasn’t expecting to see her standing at the cell door, pausing in surprise, giving Nile enough time to heft her hammer and bring it down upon his head with alacrity. He fell. She hoped it was a blow hard enough to keep him down long enough for them to make good their escape, but soft enough that he would be able to get up again. There wasn’t time to check.

Booker watched it happen with a numb expression. Had he always looked at them with such distant eyes? “Once I came upon a fox caught in a trap, in the act of gnawing off its own leg. It was so desperate it didn’t feel the pain of it or notice the blood. It just bit a piece of itself away until it was free. I have never been so envious of another living thing in all my years.” He looked at Nile for a moment before returning his gaze to his hands. “He wasn’t supposed to hurt you. He said he would let you all go.”

“You bastard,” Joe spat. “You faithless bastard.”

Nile turned back to the hinges. She suspected with a strike in the right place, they would come apart. Gripping the hammer, she eyed the first pin and swung. The hinge shifted out of place and the door moved slightly askew. Not enough to open it. Not until she swung again at the second hinge with all her strength, knocking the pin out of its groove. Then the locked door came loose enough for Nile to push open and slide through the gap.

She went first to Andy, who was bound and limp, though her eyes were open. The shackles on her wrists and ankles had burned into her skin, leaving red, angry wounds. Nile examined the shackles and pulled the pins to release the bindings. Once they were off, a spark of fury returned to Andy’s eyes and she rolled her shoulders in a shuddering manner. The burns seemed to shift and move, healing a little and then growing raw again.

“Will they heal?” Nile asked worriedly.

Andy shrugged her hand and concern off, moving instead to free Joe and Nicky. Nile knelt to undo Booker’s shackles, trying to look in his eyes. He would not meet her forthright gaze. The moment passed; Nile stood and surveyed the cellar. The guard had dropped a sword but Nile decided to forgo it. She wasn’t sure of her abilities with a sword in tight quarters, while a hammer was a hammer no matter where you went. To her surprise, it was Nicky who picked up the sword, hefting it to test the balance with ease, and Joe who took the offered blade from her hand.

Booker had not moved. His chains, open at his wrists, had not been shaken off. Nile, furious and hurt, refused him the mercy of his own despondence. “We’re not leaving you.”

Joe made a disgruntled noise. Booker matched it with his own. 

“They won’t ever give it back. What does it matter? Leave me here.”

Andy stood over Booker: tall, resolute, otherworldly. She reached one hand over her shoulder and behind her back, the air seemed to fold and exhale, and she suddenly held an axe, long and beautiful and above all deadly. When she swung it, there was a ringing like the waves of sound that flowed after the chiming of a great bell. “We’ll take it from them. Right now. So get up.”

She was in pain and furious, burns curling around her limbs like terrible vines. But she held out her hand and Booker looked and saw what Nile saw – an unstoppable force. And Merrick was no immoveable object. Booker reached up and took her offered hand, pulled himself to his feet with her help. The shackles fell with a heavy clank behind him.

“You’ve been here before, Book, and you know the Laird best. Where will he be?”

Booker fell back into the rhythm of obeying Andy, the habit motivating him when nothing else would. “In his private rooms. At the top of the north tower.”

They worked their way upwards, checking rooms. Fortunately, there were few guards and even fewer staff members. Merrick likely didn’t want witnesses for what he hoped to perpetrate. And while the guards put up a cursory resistance, the staff members pointed them in the right direction. Local and wary, they knew better than to interfere with the business of the wickies.

Nile had slipped easily into the rhythm of fighting, though she hadn’t once heard the distant whistle that haunted her so. Joe and Nicky moved together in a dance of bladed edges, fluid as a single soul fighting in two bodies. Booker, without a weapon, simply knocked down or broke the bones of anyone who stood in his path. But it was Andy who led them, a terrifying figure wielding an axe that sang strange tones with every stroke.

They came at last to a heavy door, locked and bolted, ready to stand firm against all assailants. Andy swung her axe and the door, old and solid as it was, came apart like dry kindling.

Inside stood the Laird, waiting like a snake in a hole. Merrick was a small man, in stature and in spirit, who laughed when he saw Booker enter behind them all. Nile stepped ever so slightly in front of Booker. Merrick looked her up and down and dismissed her, turning his gaze upon Andy. It was oily and lascivious, greed and desire flickering in his eyes. 

“Ah, here you are. Kind of you to come straight to me. Saves me having to chase after you again.”

Andy hefted her axe in a pointed manner.

“Give me the selkie coat and we’ll leave you unharmed.”

“That old thing? You can have it. It’s a useless bit of tat. A curio, nothing more,” Merrick’s lip curled. In one hand he held a rope that led to the far wall and out of sight. In his other hand he held out a heavy fur over the fireplace behind him, in which hungry flames licked upwards. “I was going to burn it, to tell you the truth, just to be rid of that pathetic creature’s whining. But you. You’re something worth having.”

Nile felt Booker shift away from where he had stood, moving just enough to find a clear path to Merrick.

“You want to live forever?” Andy snarled. She took a step forward, her voice otherworldly. “You dare to demand anything from _me_?”

“You don’t think you’re going to stop me, do you?” Merrick scoffed and tugged on the rope. A net made of great iron chains fell upon Andy. She shrieked just once and then fell silent, writhing beneath its weight. Joe and Nicky moved forward to help her, stopping only when Merrick held the fur towards the open flames. “You’ll give me what I ask for. _Everything_ I ask for. And maybe one day I’ll give you your freedom as payment for services rendered.”

Weedy, weaselly, other words describing rodents – Nile had met his sort before. He wanted power, and once he had it, he wanted more power. It would never be enough. Nile could not help but make an abortive movement towards Andy where she lay, drawing Merrick’s oily attention. He eyed her neck, cold eyes flicking over her scar. “It appears you know what I’m talking about. You’ve tasted it, haven’t you? What’s it like, almost dying? It must change you to see the abyss. Well, I have great plans for this world and death would only get in the way.”

The iron net clanked with movement. Andy had risen enough to kneel beneath its weight, the links burning deep into the bare skin of her face and neck as she pushed against the floor. Merrick was distracted by the movement, dropping his arm away from the flames. Just for a moment but it was enough for the crew to move as one. Time slowed into a blinking series of moments.

Nile threw the hammer at his head, where it struck with a sick thud.

Merrick dropped the pelt and it landed next to the fire, the thick fur at the edge curling and smoking from the flames, and it began to burn.

Booker, moving already towards his pelt, stumbled and fell with a terrible gasp.

Nicky and Joe were at Andy’s side, hauling the terrible net off her. It was heavy and unwieldy, and the battered pair had to heave the weight between them, dragging it away.

Booker was dragging himself across the floor, hands curled into fists and spine contorting. With each breath, he let out a desperate moan.

Nile couldn’t spare him more than a glance, not when Merrick was staggering to his feet, spitting curses and blood, reaching towards Andy. She picked up Andy’s axe.

Though Joe and Nicky managed to drag the net off, Andy was still recovering from its effects, unsteady on her feet with unusually sharp teeth bared.

Merrick, greed outpacing his reason, grabbed at her.

Nile swept the axe in a wide arc.

Andy heard the singing of her weapon and ducked.

The axe came down upon Merrick’s neck, shining and true. He fell with a shocked gurgle, blood pouring from the great gash.

Andy stood over him and though he was wounded, he was not dead. Later, Nile would be hard-pressed to remember what exactly Andy said. It was a word, or perhaps a series of words, or a strangely whistled tone. The stone floor bubbled and heaved and swallowed Merrick like it was a pit of thick mud, his horrified eyes disappearing into the liquid stone, his hands the last of him to sink, reaching out in one last gesture of grasping hunger before he was consumed in his entirety.

Time gathered itself back together and flowed again. Nile looked around in horror and ran to the fireplace, reaching out for the fur and pulling it away from the fire. She patted and smothered the flames. And there it was. Booker’s second skin. One edge was damaged, the hairs curled and smoking. Dark grey and thick, the rest of the fur was silky when stroked in one direction. Rough in another. She held it cupped in her palms. Light rippled across it as she moved.

Booker pushed himself up to his feet and at first stepped nearer but not near, a wary creature scared of capture or death. But the closer he moved, the more he changed. His shoulders, previously hunched, drew back. He stood taller than all of them, broader at the shoulders, with thicker arms, a thicker chest. His eyes, dull blue, were vivid and alive and hungry. All this time, he had made himself small.

Nile held out his pelt.

It was understandable why his wife had wanted to keep it, to keep him in turn. Even why the generations of lairds had hoarded it, despite Merrick’s cruel words. But Nile knew it was not hers and it never should be. Instead, she held the pelt out to Booker and when he took it, he wasn’t looking at her at all. When he took it in his hands, he was somewhere beyond the horizon, somewhere without cages or curses.

He didn’t say thank you. It wasn’t in the nature of wild things.

“We need to leave,” Andy broke the silence.

They left the manor. The walk back to the lighthouse was slow. Nicky and Joe walked ahead, together, reaching out occasionally to touch each other for reassurance. Andy and Nile followed, two abreast and Booker behind them all, trailing, legs moving awkwardly like he was forgetting their use. The sun was beginning to set by the time they reached the lighthouse.

“Book, stay here. We need to talk.” Andy stopped Booker from entering the cottage, handed him a glass of his favourite whisky and then the door to the kitchen.

Nile considered going inside but was suddenly afraid that Booker would disappear as soon as he was out of sight. She felt such a burdensome weight of anger and sadness, and her throat burned with all the questions she wanted to demand answers to. Ultimately, it was most simple to let them all wash away.

He sat down on the steps that led to the shore. He drank the whiskey. He held his pelt and carefully thumbed the burned section, shuddering as he did so but compelled to check it again and again.

“I didn’t mean to involve you. And I thought it would be easy, once I had it back.” His voice was rough and low. “I thought I would be… myself again. But I am still torn in two. And this time I will not be allowed to stay.”

Nile joined him on the step. “You could try apologising.”

“They won’t forgive me.”

“Is that the only reason to say you’re sorry?”

Booker blinked rapidly.

Nile leant her head against the side of his shoulder and watched the waves crash against the rocks on the bluff.

“Booker, this likely doesn’t come as a surprise, but your time at the Bressay Lighthouse has come to an end,” Andy said. “It’s not in the rule book, per se, but selling out your team to the local nobility to perform enchantments must have a cost.”

She had finally stepped out to join them, holding a bottle of whisky in one hand while an air of determination was wreathed over her head.

Joe and Nicky, nursing their wounds, gave him furious and distant looks by turn from the kitchen door. It must have been nigh on impossible to face them, though Nile noticed Booker didn’t turn away. Their expressions were wracked through with pain, not all of it physical. Then they turned and walked inside without offering any words of sufferance or farewell. Perhaps that was part of the cost too, something they were all paying and would continue to pay in the future.

“You can rest here tonight if you want, we agreed. But come first light tomorrow you’ll need to take your… things and go.” It was with a leader’s resolution that Andy laid the sentence on Booker’s head. Nile hated it, disagreed with the decision, didn’t envy the strength that it took for Andy to banish her beloved friend from their company. It was inevitable that he would go, now he could return to the ocean. But Nile had hoped he would come back when he wanted to, if he wanted to. She was terribly, terribly afraid she would never see him again.

Andy told them she couldn’t sleep – wouldn’t sleep – so she would take the whole night’s watch. Tomorrow, normal duties would resume for the four of them. There was a kind of sadness cast across her face, a relative of grief, but she only put the palm of her hand against Booker’s cheek and made him meet her eyes, until finally they wrapped together in a lasting embrace. Then she left them alone under the dimming sky without a glance backwards.

The wind whispered in the long grass, carrying the briny spray of the ocean. Booker turned his face into it, knuckles tightening on his coat as he breathed in.

“What will you do?”

Booker took a drink from the bottle, and then inspected the label, giving the impression of pondering his options. “Perhaps I’ll become a farmer.”

Nile had spent enough time with other soldiers building castles in the sky to know when she was being spun fool’s gold. “Keep us supplied with turnips and eggs?”

He wore a strange smile. It had many textures, and some of them, Nile, suspected, were not for her to understand. They came from distant oceans and sights she would never see.

“You’re good for them, Nile. You’ll do good work here. Far better than I ever have.”

Nile watched the first stars begin to appear in the sky, the constellations taking shape. “Come inside. You don’t have to go just yet.”

“No. Not yet.” Booker took her hand and followed her inside the cottage. The door to one of the bedrooms was firmly shut, probably locked, with Nicky and Joe wrapped up in each other behind it. Nile led Booker to the other and when she shut the door behind them and turned to face him, he was again holding his coat like it would disappear if he looked away. But when Nile smiled, he looked up at her and was present again, despite the lure of the ocean on the wind.

He folded his coat carefully and tucked it under one of the single cots. Booker leaned towards her then and kissed her once with soft care. He wrapped his arms around her. They laid down together, limbs entwined in the small space, and the only sounds were the familiar whistle of the wind and the susurration of waves. They didn’t make love or talk late into the night or even kiss again. Nile pressed her ear against Booker’s chest and listened to the rhythmic thumping of his heart, the insistent beating in counterpoint to the unsteady rise and fall of his breath. And while Nile wanted to stay awake just to be beside him, not to let the night drift away, Booker stroked her brow and hummed gently in her ear, and she slipped quickly into deep, dreamless sleep.

The waves were gentle upon the shore. The moon hovered high above, a sliver of a crescent set amongst the stars. The night was black, broken up only by the beaming lighthouse. The ocean was calm and waiting.

When Nile woke with the rising sun, she was alone.

In the kitchen, Andy, Joe and Nicky waited for her. Together they all walked down to the shore, following a single set of footsteps that led across crusted sand to the edge of the vast sea, and looked out over the waves. The sets rolled in, as always, crashing with froth and foam, finally coming to a trailing touch on the sand before being pulled back with the tides. Gulls cried out overhead. The brisk wind off the ocean was sharp enough to make them all squint, eyes watering, as it crossed the border between ocean and land, skidding over the Bressay coast and away again. But still, out in the deeper waters, Nile thought she saw, just for a moment, a seal’s head turned to them, dark eyes watching. She couldn’t be certain; perhaps it was just a shadow or a trick of the light. Then a cresting wave obscured her sight and he was gone.

They watched the horizon for a time, thoughtful and sad and sore. Then Joe’s stomach rumbled loudly. He cleared his throat, wiped at his face, and pondered out loud, “I do wonder when breakfast will be served today.”

Whatever uncanny mood had come over them all was broken. Nicky kissed Joe on the corner of his brow, carefully avoiding a swollen bruise, and led him away, promising him a hot meal if he would kindly wash the dishes since he was _supposed_ to do it yesterday and lapsed chores waited for no one. Their familiar flirting, while brittle at the edges, drifted over the wind. Andy squeezed Nile’s hand as they each blinked a wet sheen from their eyes, and said, “Let’s get back to work.”

They turned and followed Joe and Nicky to the lighthouse.

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Beneath the ocean’s surface, far beyond the pull of currents, lies something out of place. It would be near impossible for a person to find.

Every few seconds a stream of bubbles drifts upwards. Follow them down and behold a curious thing. A metal figure of a person, hollow but not empty. From inside comes the water-muffled sound of screaming.

Inside, a woman, or at least a woman-shaped creature, is caged.

This far below, the only colour is blue. That is all she has seen in many years. No fish swim near, no sharks, no squid. Nothing living dares approach. Just the vast, empty blue abyss she can spy in her few second of life through the small eye-level opening.

She wakes, screams out her one breath into the dark blue void, chokes on the water that fills her lungs, and dies.

She wakes, screams out her one breath into the dark blue void, chokes on the water that fills her lungs, and dies.

She wakes, screams out her one breath into the dark blue void, chokes on the water that fills her lungs, and dies.

She wakes, screams out her one breath into the dark blue void, chokes on the water that fills her lungs, and dies... but this time, as she is dying, she sees something new outside her iron cage. Something she has not seen before. And her surprised thought, before the cycle begins again, is:

_Is that a seal?_


End file.
